Majority rules are frequently used to decide whether or not a public good should be provided, but will typically fail to achieve an efficient provision. We provide a worst-case analysis of the majority rule with an optimally chosen majority threshold, assuming that voters have independent...

Zheng has proposed a seller-optimal auction for (asymmetric) independent-privatevalue environments where inter-bidder resale is possible. Zheng's construction requires novel conditions '€" Resale Monotonicity, Transitivity, and Invariance '€" on the bidders' value distribution profile. The...

We show that, in environments with independent private values and transferable utility, a privately informed principal can implement a contract that is ex-ante optimal for her. As an application, we consider a bilateral exchange environment (Myerson and Satterthwaite, 1983) in which the...

In standard auctions with symmetric, independent private value bidders resale creates a role for a speculator'€"a bidder who is commonly known to have no use value for the good on sale. For second-price and English auctions the efficient value-bidding equilibrium coexists with a continuum of...

We show that a solution to the problem of mechanism selection by an informed principal exists in a large class of environments with “generalized private values”: the agents’ payoff functions are independent of the principal’s type. The solution is an extension of Maskin and Tirole’s...

How should a society choose between two social alternatives if participation in the decision process is voluntary and costly and monetary transfers are not feasible? Considering symmetric voters with private valuations, we show that it is utilitarian-optimal to use a linear voting rule: votes...

How should a group of people decide to allocate a task that has to be done but is not adequately rewarded? This paper finds an optimal mechanism for the private provision of a public service in an environment without monetary transfers. All members of the group have the same cost of providing...

We consider 2-bidder first-price auctions where one bidder's value is commonly known. Such auctions induce an ineffcient allocation. We show that a resale opportunity, where the auction winner can make a take-it-or-leave-it offer to the loser, increases (reduces) the ineffciency of the market...

In standard auctions with symmetric, independent private value bidders resale creates a role for a speculator - a bidder who is commonly known to have no use value for the good on sale. For second-price and English auctions the efficient value-bidding equilibrium coexists with a continuum of...

Zheng has recently proposed a seller-optimal auction for (asymmetric) independentprivate- value environments where inter-bidder resale is possible. Zheng's construction requires novel conditions on the bidders' value distribution profile. We clarify the restrictions implied by these conditions....