A principal distributes an indivisible good to budget‐constrained agents when both valuation and budget are agents' private information. The principal can verify an agent's budget at a cost. The welfare‐maximizing mechanism can be implemented via a two‐stage scheme. First, agents report...

A principal distributes an indivisible good to budget-constrained agents when both valuation and budget are agents' private information. The principal can verify an agent's budget at a cost. The welfare-maximizing mechanism can be implemented via a two-stage scheme. First, agents report their...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a short-listed set. Items are differentiated by observable quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. The buyer's problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. Money does not enter the buyer's objective function,...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a shortlisted set. Items are differentiated by observable quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. The buyer's problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. Money does not enter the buyer's objective function,...

We consider a general mechanism design setting where each agent can acquire (covert) information before participating in the mechanism. The central question is whether a mechanism exists which provides the efficient incentives for information acquisition ex-ante and implements the efficient...

A principal who values an object allocates it to one or more agents. Agents learn private information (signals) from an information designer about the allocation payoff to the principal. Monetary transfer is not available but the principal can costly verify agents' private signals. The...

The auction designer has one favorite among bidders and maximizes hisutility by choosing an auction plan, i.e., choosing the auction format conditionalon the favorite's value. I show that the designer can favor one of the bidderseven if favoritism within an auction is not allowed. In this case,...

This paper studies the revelation principle for mechanisms with limited commitment when agents have correlated persistent types over the infinite horizon. After characterizing necessary and sufficient conditions to construct a mechanism with same ex-ante payoffs and interim beliefs to all...