With the goal of maximizing expected gains from trade, this paper analyzes the jointly optimal information structure and mechanism in a bilateral trade setting. The difference in gains from trade between the optimal information structure and first best constitutes the minimal loss due to...

A sender sells an object of unknown quality to a receiver who pays his expected value for it. Sender and receiver might hold different priors over quality. The sender commits to a monotone categorization of quality. We characterize the sender's optimal monotone categorization, the optimality of...

How does the increasing publicness of decisions (due, for example, to social media) affect the total costs of social signaling distortions? While pervasive signaling may induce pervasive distortions, it may also permit people to signal while distorting each choice to a smaller degree....

I study whether self-fulfilling bank runs can occur when banks use sophisticated contracts and withdrawal decisions are public information. In a finite-agent version of Diamond and Dybvig (1983) with correlated types, I first present an example in which a bank run perfect Bayesian equilibrium...

We provide conditions that simplify applying Reny's (1999) better-reply security to Bayesian games, and use these conditions to prove the existence of equilibria for classes of games in which payoff discontinuities arise only at "ties." These games include a general version of all-pay contests,...

I analyze sequential auctions with expectations-based loss-averse bidders who have independent private values and unit demand. Equilibrium bids are history dependent and subject to a discouragement effect: the higher the winning bid in the current round is, the less aggressive the bids of the...

We investigate Groves mechanisms for economies where (i) a social outcome specifies a group of winning agents, and (ii) a cost function associates each group with a monetary cost. In particular, we characterize both (i) the class of cost functions for which there are Groves mechanisms such that...

We characterize an optimal mechanism for a seller with one unit of a good facing N ≥ 3 buyers and a single competitor who sells another identical unit in a second-price auction. Buyers who do not get the seller's good compete in the competitor's subsequent auction. The mechanism features...

The theory of full implementation has been criticized for using integer/modulo games which admit no equilibrium (Jackson (1992)). To address the critique, we revisit the classical Nash implementation problem due to Maskin (1977, 1999) but allow for the use of lotteries and monetary transfers as...

Motivated by markets for ``expertise,'' we study a bandit model where a principal chooses between a safe and risky arm. A strategic agent controls the risky arm and privately knows whether its type is high or low. Irrespective of type, the agent wants to maximize duration of experimentation with...