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...

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...

We develop a Bayes–Nash analysis of the generalized second-price (GSP) auction, the multi-unit auction used by search engines to sell sponsored advertising positions. Our main result characterizes the efficient Bayes–Nash equilibrium of the GSP and provides a necessary and sufficient...

We study a sealed-bid auction between two bidders with asymmetric independent private values. The two bidders own asymmetric shares in a partnership. The higher bidder buys the lower bidderʼs shares at a per-unit price that is a convex combination of the two bids. The weight of the lower bid is...

We characterize the surplus-maximizing trading mechanism under two-sided incomplete information and interim individual rationality, when one party can make a value-enhancing specific investment. This mechanism exhibits a trade-off between providing investment incentives and inducing voluntary...

This paper investigates the choice of a licensing mechanism by the holder of a patent whose validity is uncertain. We provide sufficient conditions of a general nature under which the licensor prefers to use a per-unit royalty contract. In particular we show that this is the case for the holders...

I study the ex-ante efficient allocation of a set of quality-heterogeneous objects to a number of heterogeneous risk-neutral agents. Agents have independent private values, which represent the maximum cost they are willing to sustain to obtain an object of unitary quality. The designer faces a...

When men and women are objectively ranked in a marriage problem, say by beauty, then pairing individuals of equal rank is the only stable matching. We generalize this observation by providing bounds on the size of the rank gap between mates in a stable matching in terms of the size of the...

We consider a pairwise kidney exchange model. Roth et al. (2005) define priority matchings of the model and introduce a mechanism to derive them. In this paper, we re-examine the priority matching. First, we consider a general priority ordering where multiple patients may hold equal priority. We...

This paper considers a simple equilibrium model of an imperfectly competitive two-sided matching market. Firms and workers may have heterogeneous preferences over matches on the other side, and the model allows for both uniform and personalized wages or contracts. To make the model tractable, I...