I investigate the design of effort-maximizing mechanisms when agents have both private information and convex effort costs, and the designer has a fixed prize budget. I first demonstrate that it is always optimal for the designer to utilize a contest with as many participants as possible....

This paper argues that it cannot be taken for granted that any merger that raises consumer surplus also increases social welfare. We assume a Cournot model with homogeneous goods, linear demand, and constant marginal costs, to show that a merger can raise consumer surplus while harming social...

We study a generalization of the classical monopoly insurance problem under adverse selection (see Stiglitz [1977]) where we allow for a random distribution of losses, possibly correlated with the agent's risk parameter that is private information. Our model explains patterns of observed...

We derive the revenue maximizing allocation of m units among n symmetric agents who have unit demand, and who take costly actions that influence their values before participating in the mechanism. The allocation problem with costly actions can be represented by a reduced form model where agents...

We derive the revenue maximizing mechanism for a risk-neutral seller whofaces Yaari's [1987] dual risk-averse bidders. The optimal mechanism offers "full-insurance" in the sense that each agent's utility is independent of other agents'reports. The seller excludes less types than under risk...

When the firm has some private and unverifiable information about an employee's ability, it can design a subjective evaluation mechanism, whereby payments are tied to evaluations, to communicate such information. In this paper, I investigate how to design an optimal disclosure mechanism for the...

This paper derives optimal remedies for patent infringement, examining damages awards and injunctions. The fundamental optimality condition that applies to both awards and injunctions equates the marginal static cost of intellectual property protection with the marginal “dynamic” benefit...

This paper studies the design of the revenue maximizing selling mechanism in a scenario where bidders can make costly investments upfront to enhance their valuations. Unlike the case where bidders' values are exogenously fixed, here it may be profitable for the seller to discriminate among ex...