Organizational theory suggests that authority should lie in the hands of those with information, yet the power to transfer authority is rarely absolute in practice. We investigate the validity and application of this advice in a model of optimal contracting between an uninformed principal and...

This paper studies equilibria of the n-bidder single-object English, or open ascending price, auction in a setting with interdependent values and asymmetric bidders. Maskin (1992) showed that if the values satisfy a "single crossing" condition, then the two-bidder English auction has an...

Majority rule is known to be at odds with utilitarianism --- majority rule follows the preferences of the median voter whereas a utilitarian planner would follow the preferences of the mean voter. In this paper, we show that when voting is costly and voluntary, turnout endogenously adjusts so...

We provide a simple proof for the existence of an expected utility representation of a preference relation with an unbounded and continuous utility function.

We consider concave and Lipschitz continuous preference functionals over monetary lotteries. We show that they possess an envelope representation, as the minimum of a bounded family of continuous vN-M preference functionals. This allows us to use an envelope theorem to show that results from...

Chapter 1: Nonparametric Identification of Insurance Models with Multidimensional Screening (with Isabelle Perrigne and Quang Vuong)This chapter studies the identification of an insurance model with multidimensional screening, where insurees are characterized by risk and risk aversion. The model...