A single seller faces a sequence of buyers with unit demand. The buyers are forward-looking and long-lived. Each buyer has private information about his arrival time and valuation where the latter evolves according to a geometric Brownian motion. Any incentive-compatible mechanism has to induce...

We study a principal-agent model with moral hazard and adverse selection. Risk-neutral agents with limited liability have arbitrary private information about the distribution of outputs and the cost of effort. We show that under a multiplicative separability condition, the optimal mechanism...

With the goal of maximizing expected gains from trade, this paper analyzes the jointly optimal information structure and mechanism in a bilateral trade setting. The difference in gains from trade between the optimal information structure and first best constitutes the minimal loss due to...

I investigate the design of effort-maximizing mechanisms when agents have both private information and convex effort costs, and the designer has a fixed prize budget. I first demonstrate that it is always optimal for the designer to utilize a contest with as many participants as possible....

A sender sells an object of unknown quality to a receiver who pays his expected value for it. Sender and receiver might hold different priors over quality. The sender commits to a monotone categorization of quality. We characterize the sender's optimal monotone categorization, the optimality of...

How does the increasing publicness of decisions (due, for example, to social media) affect the total costs of social signaling distortions? While pervasive signaling may induce pervasive distortions, it may also permit people to signal while distorting each choice to a smaller degree....

I study whether self-fulfilling bank runs can occur when banks use sophisticated contracts and withdrawal decisions are public information. In a finite-agent version of Diamond and Dybvig (1983) with correlated types, I first present an example in which a bank run perfect Bayesian equilibrium...

We provide conditions that simplify applying Reny's (1999) better-reply security to Bayesian games, and use these conditions to prove the existence of equilibria for classes of games in which payoff discontinuities arise only at "ties." These games include a general version of all-pay contests,...

I analyze sequential auctions with expectations-based loss-averse bidders who have independent private values and unit demand. Equilibrium bids are history dependent and subject to a discouragement effect: the higher the winning bid in the current round is, the less aggressive the bids of the...

We investigate Groves mechanisms for economies where (i) a social outcome specifies a group of winning agents, and (ii) a cost function associates each group with a monetary cost. In particular, we characterize both (i) the class of cost functions for which there are Groves mechanisms such that...