A firm can merge with one of n potential partners. The owner of each firm has private information about both his firm's stand-alone value and a component of the synergies that would be realized by the merger involving his firm. We characterize incentive-efficient mechanisms in two cases. First,...

We consider the Hotelling-Downs model with n ≥ 2 office seeking candidates and runoff voting. We show that Nash equilibria in pure strategies always exist and that there are typically multiple equilibria, both convergent (all candidates are located at the median) and divergent (candidates...

Should the constitution of a federation allow for peaceful secession? Constitutionally defined secession rules are optimal ex post if the federation breaks down. However, they may be suboptimal ex ante if the member countries receive a benefit from the perceived long-term stability of the...

I study the general problem of a principal who desires to implement a given vector of actions and pay the agents according to a given compensation scheme. Previous work has provided mechanisms for implementation in various special cases. In this article, I fully characterize the set of action...

In a number of observed procurements, the buyer has employed an auction format that allows for a split-award outcome. We focus on settings where the range of uncertainty regarding scale economies is large and, depending on cost realizations, the efficient allocations include split-award outcomes...

Should a subset of member states of a federation be allowed to form a sub-union on some policy issue? When centralization is not politically feasible, allowing an enhanced cooperation agreement among a subset of countries permits the latter to gain benefits which would otherwise be lost....