We consider a budget-constrained mechanism designer who wants to select an optimal subset of projects to maximize her utility. Project costs are private information and the value the designer derives from their provision may vary. In this allocation problem the choice of projects - both which...

Auctions are the allocation-mechanisms of choice whenever goods and information in a market are scarce. Therefore, understanding how information in these markets affects welfare and revenues is of fundamental interest. We introduce new mathematical concepts, k- and k-m-dispersion, for...

We derive the optimal incentive compatible and individually rational mechanisms to reallocate arbitrary given ownership shares among a set of agents. These mechanisms are optimal in the sense that they maximize social surplus of the final allocation subject to the aforementioned constraints and...

We study optimal selling strategies of a seller who is poorly informed about the buyer’s value for the object. When the maxmin seller only knows that the mean of the distribution of the buyer’s valuations belongs to some interval then nature can keep him to payoff zero no matter how much...

We use perturbation analysis to study independent private-value all-pay auctions with weakly risk-averse buyers. We show that under weak risk aversion: 1) Buyers with low values bid lower and buyers with high values bid higher than they would bid in the risk neutral case. 2) Buyers with low...

This paper studies revenue-maximizing mechanisms for a monopolist who expects her buyers to resell in a secondary market. We consider two modes of resale: the first is to a third party who does not participate in the primary market; the second is inter-bidders resale, where the winner in the...

Despite negative experiences with auctioning off subsidies for renewable energy in some countries, tenders are increasingly used today. We develop a reverse auction which accounts for particularities of intermittent renewable energy sources. Determining the quantity, demanded by the regulator,...

McAfee and Reny (1992) have given a necessary and sufficient condition for full surplus extraction in models with a continuum of types. We interpret their condition as significantly stronger version of the requirement of injectiveness of the function mapping abstract types into beliefs and prove...

We develop a novel theory of real estate foreclosure auctions, which have the special feature that the lender acts as a seller for low and as a buyer for high prices. The theory yields several empirically testable predictions concerning the strategic behavior of the agents, both under symmetric...

We develop a model of lobbying in which a time and resource constrained policymaker first chooses which policy proposals to learn about, before choosing which to implement. The policymaker reviews the proposals of the interest groups who provide the highest contributions. We study how policy...