Policymakers frequently use price regulations as a response to inequality in the markets they control. In this paper, we examine the optimal structure of such policies from the perspective of mechanism design. We study a buyer-seller market in which agents have private information about both...

Drawing on classical insights from mechanism design, we show that ex post efficient mechanisms induce agents to make efficient ex ante investment choices if and only if they are strategy-proof. For mechanisms that fail to be exactly strategy-proof and/or efficient, we derive a correspondence...