We study intermediaries who seek to maximize gains from trade in bilateral negotiations. Intermediaries are players: they cannot commit to act against their objective function and deny, in some cases, trade they believe to be beneficial. This impairs their ability to assist the parties relative...

Modern information technologies make it possible to store, analyze, and trade unprecedented amounts of detailed information about individuals. This has led to public discussions on whether individuals' privacy should be better protected by restricting the amount or the precision of information...

We study a private-values buyer-seller problem with multiple objects. Valuations are binary and i.i.d. We construct mechanisms that span the set of all Pareto-efficient outcomes. The induced trading rules for objects are linked in a simple way.

We analyze a model of political competition in which the elite forms endogenously to aggregate information and advise the uninformed median voter which candidate to choose. The median voter knows whether or not the endorsed candidate is biased toward the elites, but might still prefer the biased...