This paper considers mechanism design problems in environments with ambiguity-sensitive individuals. The novel idea of the paper is to introduce ambiguity in mechanisms so as to exploit the ambiguity sensitivity of individuals. We prove a revelation principle for the partial implementation of...

This paper studies the question: Why are there Firms? Motivated by observations of a variety of economies, several distinct concepts of what it means to be a firm are identified and then analyzed with mechanism design models. In the first class of models, a group of individuals is a firm if they...

This paper presents a simple agency model to explain why third-party income reporting by employers dramatically improves income tax enforcement. Modern firms have a large number of employees and carry out complex production tasks, which requires the use of accurate business records. Because such...

This paper characterizes when the one-stage deviation IC constraints in the usual sense of dynamic mechanism design are sufficient. One can easily construct examples of when they are not sufficient. If the current state or the belief is not a sufficient summary statics of the agent's private...

We consider a setting in which potential buyers of an indivisible item have private and heterogeneous valuation and cost of capital. The valuation and cost of capital can be correlated with each other, but they are independent across buyers. In such a setting, a buyer's utility for the item is...

This paper studies mechanism design with limited commitment where agents have persistent correlated types over the infinite horizon. The mechanism designer now faces the informed-principal problem in addition to usual issues with i.i.d. types. With an infinite horizon and nondurable good, there...