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...

This paper derives necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of linear equilibria in the Rochet-Vila model of market making. In contrast to most previous work on the existence of linear equilibria in models of market making, we do not impose independence of the underlying random...

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...

The existence of a linear equilibrium in Kyle's model of market making with multiple, symmetrically informed strategic traders is implied for any number of strategic traders if the joint distribution of the underlying exogenous random variables is elliptical. The reverse implication has been...

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...

Steady state equilibria in heterogeneous agent matching models with search frictions have been shown to exist in Shimer and Smith (2000) under the assumption of a quadratic search technology. We extend their analysis to the commonly investigated linear search technology.

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 consider Kyle's market order model of insider trading with multiple informed traders and show: if a linear equilibrium exists for two different numbers of informed traders, asset payoff and noise trading are independent and have finite second moments, then these random variables are normally...