The founder of a start-up (principal) who has a project with uncertain returns must retain and incentivize an agent using promise of future payments and information gathering. The agent's effort incrementally advances production and such advance is a prerequisite for gathering new information....

This paper analyzes a common-value, first-price auction with state-dependent participation. The number of bidders, which is unobservable to them, depends on the true value. For participation patterns with many bidders in each state, the bidding equilibrium may be of a "pooling" type---with high...

Mean-preserving contractions are critical for studying Bayesian models of information design. We introduce the class of bi-pooling policies, and the class of bi-pooling distributions as their induced distributions over posteriors. We show that every extreme point in the set of all...

We study ex post implementation in collective decision problems where monetary transfers cannot be used. We find that deterministic ex post implementation is impossible if the underlying environment is neither almost an environment with private values nor almost one with common values. Thus,...

We analyze the Baron and Myerson (1982) model of regulation under the restriction that transfers are infeasible. Extending techniques from the delegation literature to incorporate an ex-post participation constraint, we report sufficient conditions under which optimal regulation takes the form...

We present a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a class of optimal control problems with pure state constraints for which the objective function is linear in the state variable but the objective function is only required to be upper semi-continuous in the control variable. We apply...

Theorem 1 in Bhargava, Mohit et al. (2015) provides a necessary condition for a social choice function to be LOBIC with respect to a belief system satisfying top-set (TS) correlation. In this paper, we provide a counter example to that theorem and consequently provide a new necessary condition...

A single seller faces a sequence of buyers with unit demand. The buyers are forward-looking and long-lived. Each buyer has private information about his arrival time and valuation where the latter evolves according to a geometric Brownian motion. Any incentive-compatible mechanism has to induce...

We study a principal-agent model with moral hazard and adverse selection. Risk-neutral agents with limited liability have arbitrary private information about the distribution of outputs and the cost of effort. We show that under a multiplicative separability condition, the optimal mechanism...

I study how the arrival of new private information affects bargaining outcomes. A seller makes offers to a buyer. The buyer is privately informed about her valuation, and the seller privately observes her stochastically changing cost of delivering the good. Prices fall gradually at the early...