This paper addresses a fundamental, yet unresolved, question: is statistical discrimination a market failure? I consider the problem for a utilitarian social planner who operates in an environment with imperfectly observable human capital investments. It is found that the informational problem...

The finite horizon version of a popular legislative bargaining model due to Baron and Ferejohn is investigated. With three or more rounds of bargaining a continuum of distributions are supportable as subgame perfect equilibria in Markov strategies. Allowing for history dependent strategies...

This paper studies "voluntary bargaining agreements" in an environment where preferences over an excludable public good are private information. Unlike the case with a non-excludable public good, there are non-trivial conditions when there is significant provision in a large economy. The...

This paper provides a simple explanation for why some minority groups are economically successful, despite being subject to government-mandated discriminatory policies. We study an economy with private and public sectors in which workers invest in imperfectly observable skills that are important...

We study an economy with private and public sectors in which workers invest in imperfectly observable skills that are important to the private sector but not to the public sector. Government regulation allows native majority workers to be employed in the public sector with positive probability...

This paper studies the optimal provision mechanism for multiple excludable public goods when agents' valuations are private information. For a parametric class of problems with binary valuations, we characterize the optimal mechanism, and show that it involves bundling. Bundling alleviates the...

Comparing monopoly bundling with separate sales is relatively straightforward in an environment with a large number of goods. In this paper we show that results that are similar to the asymptotic results can be obtained in the more realistic case with a given finite number of goods provided that...

We provide a simple proof of the equivalence between ex ante and ex post budget balance constraints in Bayesian mechanism design with independent types when participation decisions are made at the interim stage. The result is given an interpretation in terms of efficient allocation of risk

In incomplete information environments with transferable utility, efficient outcomes are generally implementable unless interim or ex post participation constraints are imposed on the problem. In this paper we show that linking a sufficiently large number of independent but possibly unrelated...