We introduce a perfect price discriminating (PPD) mechanism for allocation problems with private information. A PPD mechanism treats a seller, for example, as a perfect price discriminating monopolist who faces a price schedule that does not depend on her report. In any PPD mechanism, every...

A necessary and sufficient condition for dominant strategy implementability when preferences are quasilinear is that, for any individual i and any choice of the types of the other individuals, all k-cycles in i's allocation graph have nonnegative length for every integer k � 2. Saks and Yu...

Whether rationality of economic behavior increases with expected payoffs and decreases with the cognitive cost it takes to formulate an optimal strategy remains an open question. We explore these issues with field data, using individual bids from sealed-bid auctions in which we sold nearly...

We introduce a subsidized Vickrey auction for cost sharing problems. Although the average, marginal, and serial cost sharing mechanisms are budget-balanced, they are not allocatively efficient and they do not induce players to truthfully reveal their values as a dominant strategy. The...

In this paper, we study the incentives for market concentration of (online and traditional) auction houses. Would sellers and buyers be better off if two separate auction houses merged? We suppose that each auction house has a separate clientele of sellers and buyers. Sellers value their...

We briefly review two basic models of settlement bargaining based on concepts from information economics and game theory. We then discuss how these models have been generalized to address issues that arise when there are more than two litigants with related cases. Linkages between cases can...

We examine the interplay of imperfect competition and incomplete information in the context of price competition among firms producing horizontally- and vertically-differentiated substitute products. We find that incomplete information about vertical quality (e.g., consumer satisfaction) that is...

We build a model consisting of a borrowing firm, a lending institution (bank), and a third party influencing loan decision-making (auditor/government regulator) where a low-type firm can bribe the auditor to file an untruthful report about its true type so as to obtain a loan from the bank to...

Is conformity amongst similar individuals consistent with self-interested behavior? We consider a model of incomplete information in which each player receives a signal, interpreted as an allocation to a role, and can make his action choice conditional on his role. Our main result demonstrates...

"Most-favored-nation" (hereafter, MFN) clauses have been used in analyses of international trade, durable goods monopoly pricing, and franchise contracting to address a repeat player's time-inconsistency problem. Recent work by Spier (forthcoming and 2002) has extended this perspective to the...