A principal uses security bid auctions to award an incentive contract to one among several agents in the presence of hidden action and hidden information. Securities range from cash to equity and call options. "Steeper" securities are better surplus extractors that narrow the gap between the two...

An auction is externality-robust if unilateral deviations from equilibrium leave the other bidders' payoffs unaffected. The equilibrium and its outcome will then persist if certain types of externalities arise between bidders. One example are externalities due to spiteful preferences, which have...

In mechanism design, Myerson regularity is often too weak for a quantitative analysis of performance. For instance, ratios between revenue and welfare, or sales probabilities may vanish at the boundary of Myerson regularity. This paper therefore explores the quantitative version of Myerson...

Individuals use narratives as rationales or justifications to make their claims more convincing. I provide a general framework for partial verifiability based on narratives. Narratives give many reasons and arguments. The receiver derives the message’s meaning by aggregating these reasons; her...

This article studies the design of optimal mechanisms to regulate entry in natural oligopoly markets, assuming the regulator is unable to control the behavior of firms once they are in the market. We adapt the Clark-Groves mechanism, characterize the optimal mechanism that maximizes the weighted...

Casting mechanism design with evidence in the framework of Myerson (1982) implies that his generalized revelation principle directly applies, and we thus obtain standard notions of incentive compatible direct mechanisms. Their specific nature depends, however, on whether the presentation of...

Tying arrangements recently have been a major and contentious issue in many high profile antitrust cases in the US and Europe. Examples include the Microsoft case, the Visa and MasterCard case, and the proposed GE/Honeywell merger to name a few. This paper conducts a selective review of the...

We propose a smooth multibidding mechanism for environments where a group of agents have to choose one out of several projects. Our proposal is related to the multibidding mechanism (Pérez-Castrillo and Wettstein, 2002) but it is "smoother" in the sense that small variations in an agent's bids...

This paper explores the sale of an object to an ambiguity averse buyer. We show that the seller can increase his profit by using an ambiguous mechanism. That is, the seller can benefit from hiding certain features of the mechanism that he has committed to from the agent. We then characterize the...