We design and implement an iterative, program-proposing deferred acceptance mechanism with ties (IDAT) and apply it to childcare assignment in two German cities. The mechanism can accommodate complementarities in providers' preferences, is fast to terminate even in larger cities, is difficult to...

Despite the availability of low-cost exchanges, over-the-counter (OTC) trading is pervasive for most assets. We explain the prevalence of OTC trading using a model of adverse selection, in which informed and uninformed investors choose to trade over-the-counter or on an exchange. OTC dealers'...

I study a mechanism design problem in which a designer allocates a single good to one of several agents, and the mechanism is followed by an aftermarket -- a post-mechanism game played between the agent who acquired the good and third-party market participants. The designer has preferences over...

We study the consequences of high-frequency trading (HFT) — and potential policy responses — via the tradeoff between liquidity and information production. Faster speeds facilitate HFT with consequences for this tradeoff: information production diminishes because informed traders have less...

Mechanisms used to derive optimal allocations are generally designed under the premise that agents fully know their preferences. It is often impossible to duplicate these optimal allocations when agents imperfectly observe object characteristics. I present a crowdsourcing mechanism to...

In many random assignment problems, the central planner has their own policy objective, such as matching size and minimum quota fulfillment. A number of practically important policy objectives are not aligned with agents' preferences and known to be incompatible with strategy-proofness. This...

This paper studies fixed-price mechanisms in bilateral trade with ex ante symmetric agents. We show that the optimal price is particularly simple: it is exactly equal to the mean of the agents' distribution. The optimal price guarantees a worst-case performance of at least 1/2 of the first-best...

This paper studies the class of robust equilibria in a general competing mechanism game for decentralized markets with frictions in which non-deviating sellers punish a deviator with dominant strategy incentive compatible (DIC) direct mechanisms. Given one-dimensional, independent, and private...

We study markets for information in the form of Bayesian signals. The main feature of such markets is that information is costly for the seller to acquire and cannot be verified by the buyer. We provide a full characterization of the set of all compensation schemes (viz., menus) which guarantee...