It is well-known that the ability of the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism to implement efficient outcomes for private value choice problems does not extend to interdependent value problems. When an agent's type affects other agents' utilities, it may not be incentive compatible for him to...

Why do some incomplete information markets feature intermediaries while others do not? I study the allocation of two goods in an incomplete information setting with a single principal, multiple agents with unit demand, and interdependent valuations. I construct a novel dynamic mechanism...

We study the informed-principal problem in a bilateral asymmetric information trading setting with interdependent values and quasi-linear utilities. The informed seller proposes a mechanism and voluntarily certifies information about the good's characteristics. When the set of certifiable...

I study a persuasion game between a privately informed agent and a decision maker (DM) who can imperfectly verify the statements made by the agent by observing a signal that is correlated with the agent's information. I find that whether or not the DM benefits from communicating with the agent...

We study a principal--agent model. The parties are symmetrically informed at first; the principal then designs the process by which the agent learns his type and, concurrently, the screening mechanism. Because the agent can opt out of the mechanism ex post, it must leave him with nonnegative...

This paper studies mechanism design when agents are maxmin expected utility maximizers. A first result gives a general necessary condition for a social choice rule to be implementable. The condition combines an inequality version of the standard envelope characterization of payoffs in...

We study full surplus extraction and implementation in dynamic environments. We exploit intertemporal correlations of agents' types to construct within-period ex post incentive compatible mechanisms. First, we formulate one-shot environments, in which a single agent has a hidden type and the...

I study a principal's optimal choice of constraint for an agent participating in an auction (or auction-like allocation mechanism). I give necessary and sufficient conditions on the principal's beliefs about the value of the item for a simple budget constraint to be the optimal contract. The...

This paper addresses the problem of implementing socially efficient allocations in dynamic environments with interdependent valuations and evolving private information. In the case where the agents' information is correlated across time, we construct efficient and incentive compatible direct...

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...