Consider a market with many identical firms offering a homogeneous good. A consumer obtains price quotes from a subset of firms and buys from the firm offering the lowest price. The “price count” is the number of firms from which the consumer obtains a quote. For any given ex ante...

A profit-maximizing Seller has a single unit of a good to sell. The bidders have a pure common value that is drawn from a distribution that is commonly known. The Seller does not know the bidders' beliefs about the value and thinks that the information structure is chosen adversarially by Nature...

We study the design of profit-maximizing mechanisms in environments with interdependent values. A single unit of a good is for sale. There is a known joint distribution of the bidders' ex post values for the good. Two programs are considered:(i) Maximize over mechanisms the minimum over...

We study the pure-strategy subgame-perfect Nash equilibria of stochastic games with perfect monitoring, geometric discounting, and public randomization. Novel algorithms are developed for calculating the discounted payoffs that can be attained in equilibrium. We also provide implementations of...

A profit-maximizing Seller has a single unit of a good to sell. The bidders have a pure common value that is drawn from a distribution that is commonly known. The Seller does not know the bidders' beliefs about the value and thinks that beliefs are designed adversarially by Nature to minimize...

If Anne knows more than Bob about the state of the world, she may or may not know what Bob thinks, but it is always possible that she does. In other words, if the distribution of Anne's belief about the state is a mean-preserving spread of the distribution of Bob's belief, we can construct...

We propose a novel proportional cost-sharing mechanism for funding public goods with interdependent values: the agents simultaneously submit bids, which are non-negative numbers; the expenditure on the public good is an increasing and concave function of the sum of the bids; and each agent is...

Around 1947, von Neumann showed that for any finite two-person zero-sum game, there is a feasible linear programming (LP) problem consisting of a primal-dual pair of linear programs whose saddle points yield equilibria of the game, thus providing an immediate proof of the minimax theorem from...