We investigate why people keep their promises in the absence of external enforcement mechanisms and reputational effects. In a controlled laboratory experiment we show that exogenous variation of second-order expectations (promisors' expectations about promisees' expectations that the promise...

We consider truthful implementation of the socially efficient allocation in a dynamic private value environment in which agents receive private information over time. We propose a suitable generalization of the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism, based on the marginal contribution of each agent. In...

The appearance of a Brownian term in the price dynamics on a stock market was interpreted in [De Meyer, Moussa-Saley (2003)] as a consequence of the informational asymmetries between agents. To take benefit of their private information without revealing it to fast, the informed agents have to...

We consider truthful implementation of the socially efficient allocation in an independent private-value environment in which agents receive private information over time. We propose a suitable generalization of the pivot mechanism, based on the marginal contribution of each agent. In the...

Conflicts of interest arise between a decision maker and agents who have information pertinent to the problem because of differences in their preferences over outcomes. We show how the decision maker can extract the information by distorting the decisions that will be taken, and show that only...

We consider a principal who is keen to induce his agents to work at their maximal effort levels. To this end, he samples n days at random out of the T days on which they work, and awards a prize of B dollars to the most productive agent. The principal's policy (B,n) induces a strategic game...

This paper characterizes an equilibrium payoff subset for dynamic Bayesian games as discounting vanishes. Monitoring is imperfect, transitions may depend on actions, types may be correlated and values may be interdependent. The focus is on equilibria in which players report truthfully. The...

We analyze nonlinear pricing with finite information. A seller offers a menu to a continuum of buyers with a continuum of possible valuations. The menu is limited to offering a finite number of choices representing a finite communication capacity between buyer and seller. We identify necessary...

We analyze the welfare consequences of a monopolist having additional information about consumers' tastes, beyond the prior distribution; the additional information can be used to charge different prices to different segments of the market, i.e., carry out "third degree price discrimination." We...