Consider an agent (manager,artist, etc.) who has imperfect private information about his productivity. At the beginning of his career (period 1, “short run”), the agent chooses among publicly observable actions that generate imperfect signals of his productivity. The actions can be ranked...

We analyze the performance of various communication protocols in a generalization of the Crawford-Sobel (1982) model of cheap talk that allows for multiple receivers. We find that the sender prefers communicating by private messages if the receivers' average bias is high, and by public messages...

We solve for the optimal mechanism for selling two goods when the buyer’s demand characteristics are unobservable. In the case of substitutable goods, the seller has an incentive to offer lotteries over goods in order to charge the buyers with large differences in the valuations a higher price...

We extend the ‘no-haggling’ result of Riley and Zeckhauser (1983) to the class of linear multiproduct monopoly problems when the buyer’s valuations are smoothly distributed. In particular we show that there is no loss for the seller in optimizing over mechanisms such that all allocations...

We study communication in a static Cournot duopoly model under the assumption that the firms have unverifiable private information about their costs. We show that cheap talk between the firms cannot transmit any information. However, if the firms can communicate through a third party,...

We derive a bound on the seller's revenue loss in optimal auctions from unanticipated bidder collusion. The relative loss is rather small when there are few bidders. It is increasing with the number of bidders but at a slow rate.