This paper studies the design of a recommender system for organizing social learning on a product. To improve incentives for early experimentation, the optimal design trades off fully transparent social learning by over-recommending a product (or “spamming”) to a fraction of agents in the...

The Boston mechanism is among the most popular school choice procedures in use. Yet, the mechanism has been criticized for its poor incentive and welfare performances, which led the Boston Public Schools to recently replace it with Gale and Shapley's deferred acceptance algorithm (henceforth,...

The Boston mechanism is among the most popular school choice procedures in use. Yet, the mechanism has been criticized for its poor incentive and welfare performances, which led the Boston Public Schools to recently replace it with Gale and Shapley's deferred acceptance algorithm (henceforth,...

A "decoupled" liability system is one in which the award to the plaintiff differs from the payment by the defendant. The optimal system of decoupling makes the defendant's payment as high as possible. Such a policy allows the award to the plaintiff to be lowered, thereby reducing the plaintiff's...

A principal chooses one of n ≥ 2 projects or an outside option. An agent is privately informed about the projects' benefits and shares the principal's preferences except for not internalizing her value from the outside option. We show that strategic communication is characterized by...

This paper studies alternative contract damage measures in the presence of specific investments that generate a direct benefit to the investor's trading partner (referred to as "cooperative investments"). We find that, both with and without the possibility of ex post renegotiation, (i) the...

This paper considers settlement negotiations between a single defendant and N plaintiffs when there are Fixed costs of litigation. When making simultaneous take-it-or-leave-it offers to the plaintiffs, the defendant adopts a divide and conquer strategy. Plaintiffs settle their claims for less...