We examine the optimal selling strategy of a monopolist facing consumers who have privately known demands, and some of whom have limited abilities to misrepresent their preferences. We derive the optimal mechanism in this environment and characterize its properties. In particular, we show that...

We investigate the issue of implementation via individually rational ex-post budget-balanced Bayesian mechanisms. We show that all decision rules generating a nonnegative expected social surplus are implementable if and only if the probability distribution of the agents' types satisfies two...

In this paper we study "investment tournaments," a class of decision problems that involve gradual allocation of investment among several alternatives whose values are subject to exogenous shocks. The decision-maker's payoff is determined by the final values of the alternatives. An important...

In the United States, more than two-thirds of decedents with multichild families divide their estates exactly equally among their children. In contrast, intra vivos gifts are usually unequal. These findings challenge the validity of existing theories regarding the determination of...

The paper characterizes both the optimal (revenue-maximizing) and constrained-efficient (surplus maximizing) mechanisms for allocating a good to buyers who face budget constraints. With unequal budgets, this problem is that of asymmetric optimal mechanism design. Both the optimal and efficient...