In standard auctions with symmetric, independent private value bidders resale creates a role for a speculatora 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 consider 2-bidder rst-price auctions where one bidder's value is commonly known. Such auctions induce an inefficient 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 inefficiency of the market...

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...

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...

We show that, in environments with independent private values and transferable utility, a privately informed principal can solve her mechanism selection problem by implementing an allocation that is ex-ante optimal for her. No type of the principal can gain from proposing an alternative...

We provide a solution to the informed-principal problem in the independent private values setting with monetary transfers. The principal's private information creates signaling considerations that may distort the implemented allocation. We show that there is no distortion: all principal types...