Strausz (2017) claims that crowdfunding implements the optimal mechanism design outcome in an environment with entrepreneurial moral hazard and private cost information. Unfortunately, his analysis, solution and claim depend critically on imposing an untenable condition (29) that he had...

We study a dynamic model of monopolistic provision of commitment devices to sophisticated, Strotzian decision makers. We allow for unobservable heterogeneity at the contracting stage in the agents' preferences for commitment vs. flexibility. The first-best contracts under complete information...

This paper is concerned with the situation in which a profit-maximizing monopolist faces consumers that are diverse not only in their preferences but also in their levels of bounded rationality. The behavioral phenomenon considered here is the attraction effects when choices are made across...

We analyze the impact of the length of incomplete contracts on investment and surplus sharing. In the bilateral relationship explored, the seller controls the input and the buyer invests. With two-part tariffs, the length of the contract is irrelevant: the surplus is maximal and goes to the...

We study the effects of exclusive contracts and market-share discounts (i.e., discounts conditioned on the share a firm receives of the customer's total purchases) in an adverse selection model where firms supply differentiated products and compete in non-linear prices. We show that exclusive...

Motivated by challenges facing IT procurement, this paper studies a hybrid procurement model where a reverse auction of a fixed-price IT outsourcing contract may be followed by renegotiation to extend the contract's scope. In this model, the buyer balances the need to incentivize...

We study optimal contracting between a firm selling a divisible good that exhibits positive externality and a group of agents in a social network. The extent of externality that each agent receives from the consumption of neighboring agents is privately held and is unknown to the firm. By...

Temporary water transfers, as achievable under option contracts, capture gains from trade that would go unrealized if only permanent transfers of water rights were possible. This paper develops a bilateral option contracting model for water which includes the possibility of conveyance losses and...

This paper considers the efficiency of a contestable natural monopoly if consumers are heterogeneous and the monopolist can differentiate prices imperfectly. The paper shows that a no-distortion-at-the-top result, which is standard in models with restricted entry, may also appear in a...

We study contracting and costly renegotiation in settings of complete, but unverifiable information, using the mechanism-design approach. We show how renegotiation activity is best modeled in the fundamentals of the mechanism-design framework, so that noncontractibility of renegotiation amounts...