We investigate fairness preferences in matching mechanisms using a spectator design. Participants choose between the Boston mechanism or the serial dictatorship mechanism (SD) played by others. In our setup, the Boston mechanism generates justified envy, while the strategy-proof SD ensures...

We study preferences over procedures in the presence of naive agents. We employ a school choice setting following Pathak and Sönmez (2008) who show that sophisticated agents are better off under the Boston mechanism than under a strategy-proof mechanism if some agents are sincere. We use lab...

Mobility of high-income individuals across borders puts pressure on governments to lower taxes. A central tenet of the corresponding textbook argument is that mobile individuals react to tax differentials through migra- tion, and in turn immobile individuals vote for lower taxes. We investigate...

We consider a dynamic screening model where the agent may go bankrupt due to, for example, cash constraints. We model bankruptcy as a verifiable event that occurs whenever the agent makes a per period loss. This leads to less stringent truth-telling constraints than those considered in the...

Restrictions on certifiers' fee structures are irrelevant for maximizing their profits and trade efficiency, and for the implementability of (monotone) distributions of rents. The irrelevance results exploit that certification schemes involve two substitutable dimensions – the fee structure...

We study information flows in an organization with a top management (principal) and multiple subunits (agents) with private information that determines the organization's aggregate efficiency. Under centralization, eliciting the agents' private information may induce the principal to manipulate...

A multi-product monopolist sells sequentially to a buyer who privately learns his valuations. Using big data, the monopolist learns the intertemporal correlation of the buyer's valuations. Perfect price discrimination is generally unattainable – even when the seller learns the correlation...

We study an agency model with vertical hierarchy - the principal, the prime-agent and the sub-agent. The principal faces a project that needs both agents' services. Due to costly communication, the principal receives a report only from the prime-agent, who receives a report from the sub-agent....

We show that every sequential screening model is equivalent to a standard text book static screening model. We use this result and apply well-established techniques from static screening to obtain solutions for classes of sequential screening models for which standard sequential screening...

We study contracting between a public good provider and users with private valuations of the good. We show that, once the provider extracts the users' private information, she benefits from manipulating the collective information received from all users when communicating with them. We derive...