This paper provides a refinement that uniquely selects the ex-ante Pareto dominant equilibrium in a cheap talk game. The refinement works by embedding any cheap talk game into a class of two-stage games where: in stage 1 sender and receiver choose their biases at a cost, and in stage 2 the cheap...

Adverse selection in procurement arises when low-cost bidders are also low-quality suppliers. We propose a mechanism called LoLA which, under some conditions, is the best incentive-compatible mechanism for maximizing any combination of buyer’s and social surplus in the presence of adverse...

We show that the first welfare theorem obtains independently of the strength of property rights protection. In an exchange setting, a large class of legal rules (what we call generalized liability rules) are exchange-efficient. Included in this class are property rules (generalized liability...

This paper presents a new model of political competition where candidates belong to factions. Before elections, factions compete to direct local public goods to their local constituencies. The model of factional competition delivers a rich set of implications relating the internal organization...

We prove existence and uniqueness of equilibrium in a 2-bidder asymmetric first price auction with affiliated values. The techniques used to prove uniqueness are different from the ones used in analyses of private values environments. Moreover the proof of existence is constructive. For...