We show that, in environments with independent private values and transferable utility, a privately informed principal can implement a contract that is ex-ante optimal for her. As an application, we consider a bilateral exchange environment (Myerson and Satterthwaite, 1983) in which the...

Zheng has proposed a seller-optimal auction for (asymmetric) independent-privatevalue environments where inter-bidder resale is possible. Zheng's construction requires novel conditions - Resale Monotonicity, Transitivity, and Invariance - on the bidders' value distribution profile. The only...

In standard auctions with symmetric, independent private value bidders resale creates a role for a speculator' a bidder who is commonly known to have no use value for the good on sale. For second-price and English auctions the efficient value-bidding equilibrium coexists with a continuum of...

Majority rules are frequently used to decide whether or not a public good should be provided, but will typically fail to achieve an efficient provision. We provide a worst-case analysis of the majority rule with an optimally chosen majority threshold, assuming that voters have independent...