This paper explores how a change in a default—specifically, an exogenously given reference point—affects individual preferences. While reference dependence is extensively studied, very little is known regarding the impact of reference points on individual choice behavior when the reference...

We study the problem of risk sharing within a household or syndicate. A household shares risky prospects using a social welfare functional. We characterize the social welfare functionals such that the household is collectively less risk averse than each member, and satisfies the Pareto principle...

We show that in multi-sender communication games where senders imperfectly observe the state, if the state space is large enough, then there can exist equilibria arbitrarily close to full revelation of the state as the noise in the senders' observations gets small. In the case of replacement...

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...

In the basic adverse selection model, a seller makes a contract offer to a privately informed buyer. A fundamental hypothesis of incentive theory is that the seller may want to offer a menu of contracts to separate the buyer types. In the good state of nature, total surplus is not different from...

We consider full implementation in complete-information environments when agents have an arbitrarily small preference for honesty. We offer a condition called separable punishment and show that when it holds and there are at least two agents, any social choice function can be implemented by a...

In a game with incomplete information players receive stochastic signals about the state of nature. The distribution of the signals given the state of nature is determined by the information structure. Different information structures may induce different equilibria.

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...

A contract auction establishes a contract between a center and one of the bidders. As contracts may describe many terms, preferences over contracts typically display indifferences. The Qualitative Vickrey Auction (QVA) selects the best contract for the winner that is at least as good for the...

We provide a game-theoretic model of sequential information aggregation motivated by online question-and-answer forums. An asker posts a question and each user decides when to aggregate a unique piece of information with existing information. When the quality exceeds a certain threshold, the...