We introduce intention-based social preferences into a mechanism design framework with independent private values and quasilinear payoffs. For the case where the designer has no information about the intensity of social preferences, we provide conditions under which mechanisms which have been...

We introduce intention-based social preferences into a Bayesian mechanism design framework. We first show that, under common knowledge of social preferences, any tension between material efficiency, incentive compatibility, and voluntary participation can be resolved. Hence, famous impossibility...

Two potentially asymmetric players compete for a prize of common value, which is initially unknown, by exerting efforts. A designer has two instruments for contest design. First, she decides whether and how to disclose an informative signal of the prize value to players. Second, she sets the...

This paper examines the optimal mechanism design problem when buyers have uncertain valuations. This uncertainty can only be resolved after the actual transactions take place and upon incurring significant post-purchase cost. We focus on two different settings regarding how the seller values a...

This paper describes a nearly optimal auction mechanism that does not require previous knowledge of the distribution of values of potential buyers. The mechanism we propose builds on the new literature on the elicitation of information from experts. We extend the latter to the case where the...

We characterize the boundaries of the set of transfers (extremal transfers) implementing a given allocation rule without imposing any assumptions on the agentʼs type space or utility function besides quasi-linearity. Exploiting the concept of extremal transfers allows us to obtain an exact...

In this paper, we examine the optimal mechanism design of selling an indivisible object to one regular buyer and one publicly known buyer, where inter-buyer resale cannot be prohibited. The resale market is modeled as a stochastic ultimatum bargaining game between the two buyers. We fully...

This paper studies optimal auction design when the seller can affect the buyersʼ valuations through an unobservable ex ante investment. The key insight is that the optimal mechanism may have the seller play a mixed investment strategy so as to create correlation between the buyersʼ otherwise...

We derive several implications of incentive compatibility in general (i.e., not necessarily quasilinear) environments. Building on Kos and Messner (2013), we provide a (partial) characterization of incentive compatible mechanisms.

Every agent reports his willingness to pay for one unit of a good. A mechanism allocates goods and cost shares to some agents. We characterize the group strategyproof (GSP) mechanisms under two alternative continuity conditions interpreted as tie-breaking rules. With the maximalist rule (MAX) an...