This paper studies mechanisms for allocating rights to forge new blocks on a blockchain. The proof of work contest (PoW) where all block generators, or miners, compete for finding the next block is characterized. The central feature of the PoW contest is that no miner has an incentive to...

I model access to influence as a two-sided matching market between a continuum of experts and two vertically differentiated gatekeepers under sequential directed search. Real-world examples include academic publishing, venture capital, job search or political agenda setting. The equilibrium is...

This paper shows that a monopolistic certifying party can have incentives to disclose revealing information about the agent he is certifying. Using a three-person game-theoretic model and allowing certificate users (buyers) to have noisy estimates of the quality level of the agent being...

I model access to influence as a two-sided matching market between a continuum of experts and a finite number of gatekeepers under sequential directed search. Real-world examples include academic publishing, venture capitalism or political agenda setting. Uniqueness of the resulting equilibrium...

We consider a model of oligopolistic firms that have private information about their cost structure. Prior to competing in the market a competitive advantage, i.e., a cost reducing technology, is allocated to a subset of the firms by means of a multi-object auction. After the auction either all...

We analyze the doping behavior of heterogeneous athletes in an environment of private information. In a n-player strategic game, modeled as an all-pay auction, each athlete has private information about his actual physical ability and choses the amount of performance-enhancing drugs. The use of...

Potential bidders respond to a seller's choice of auction mechanism for a common-value or affiliated-values asset by endogenous decisions whether to incur an information-acquisition cost (and observe a private estimate), or forgo competing. Privately informed participants decide whether to incur...

We study all-pay auctions (or wars of attrition), where the highest bidder wins an object, but all bidders pay their bids. We consider such auctions when two bidders alternate in raising their bids and where all aspects of the auction are common knowledge including bidders' valuations. We...

We propose a novel proportional cost-sharing mechanism for funding public goods with interdependent values: the agents simultaneously submit bids, which are non-negative numbers; the expenditure on the public good is an increasing and concave function of the sum of the bids; and each agent is...

We study when equilibrium prices can aggregate information in an auction market with a large population of traders. Our main result identifies a property of information—the betweenness property that is both necessary and sufficient for information aggregation. The characterization provides...