Truthful revelation of preferences has emerged as a desideratum in the design of school choice programs. Gale-Shapley's deferred acceptance mechanism is strategy-proof for students but limits their ability to communicate their preference intensities. This results in ex-ante ineciency when ties...

Truthful revelation of preferences has emerged as a desideratum in the design of school choice programs. Gale-Shapley's deferred acceptance mechanism is strategy-proof for students but limits their ability to communicate their preference intensities. This results in ex-ante inefficiency when...

We examine the use of breakup fees as a device for target firms to recruit white knights in response to a hostile takeover bid. When bidders have interdependent valuations of the target, the possible use of a breakup fee to subsidize entry of a subsequent bidder overdisciplines the initial...

Section 365 of the Bankruptcy Code prohibits enforcement of the once common "ipso facto" clause." The clause excuses the solvent party from performance of the contract when the other party becomes insolvent. We show that the ability of insolvent firms to continue bad projects is enhanced by the...

A contract with multiple agents may be susceptible to collusion. We show that agents' collusion imposes no cost in a large class of circumstances with risk neutral agents, including both uncorrelated and correlated types. In those circumstances, any payoff the principal can attain in the absence...

The random priority (random serial dictatorship) mechanism is a common method for assigning objects to individuals. The mechanism is easy to implement and strategy-proof. However this mechanism is inefficient, as the agents may be made all better off by another mechanism that increases their...

This paper considers settlement negotiations between a single defendant and N plaintiffs when there are fixed costs of litigation. When making simultaneous take-it-or-leave-it offers to the plaintiffs, the defendant adopts a divide and conquer strategy. Plaintiffs settle their claims for less...

A contract with multiple agents may be susceptible to collusion. We show that agents' collusion imposes no cost in a large class of circumstances with risk neutral agents, including both uncorrelated and correlated types. In those circumstances, any payoff the principal can attain in the absence...