Prosper, today the second largest social lending marketplace with nearly 1.5 million members and $380 million in funded loans, employed an auction mechanism amongst lenders to finance each borrower's loan until 2010. Given that a basic premise of social lending is cheap loans for borrowers, how...

We study the second best in a single unit sale to two bidders. This is the allocation that maximizes the expected social surplus subject to the biddersʼ incentive compatible constraints when the first best is not implementable. We prove that Maskinʼs (1992) result that any first best...

We consider a licensing mechanism for process innovations that awards a limited number of unrestricted licenses to those firms that report the highest cost reductions, combined with royalty licenses to others. Firmsʼ messages are dual signals of their cost reductions: the message of those who...

This paper develops a payoff equivalence theorem for mechanisms with ambiguity averse participants with preferences of the Maxmin Expected Utility (MEU) form (Gilboa and Schmeidler, 1989). We use our payoff equivalence result to explicitly characterize the revenue maximizing private value...

A number of identical objects is allocated to a set of privately informed agents. Agents have linear utility in money. The designer wants to assign objects to agents that possess specific traits, but the allocation can only be conditioned on the willingness to pay and on observable...

Every agent reports his willingness to pay for one unit of a good. A mechanism allocates goods and cost shares to some agents. We characterize the group strategyproof (GSP) mechanisms under two alternative continuity conditions interpreted as tie-breaking rules. With the maximalist rule (MAX) an...

Often an organization or government must allocate goods without collecting payment in return. This may pose a difficult problem either when agents receiving those goods have private information in regards to their values or needs. In this paper, we find an optimal mechanism to allocate goods...

Donations in-kind can be a mixed blessing for charities, who are often more adept at solicitation than resale. Many organizations rely on raffles to turn donations into cash, but auctions are also common. Theory predicts that all-pay mechanisms should produce more revenue than winner-pay...

We study all-pay auctions with multiple prizes. The players have the same value for all the certain prizes except for one uncertain prize for which each player has a private value. We characterize the equilibrium strategy and show that, independent of the ranking of the uncertain prize, if the...

We study multi-object auctions in the presence of post-auction trade opportunities among bidders who have either single- or multi-object demand. We focus on two formats: Vickrey auctions where package bidding is possible and simultaneous second-price auctions. We show that, under...