Many sales, sports, and research contests are put in place to maximize contestants' performance. We investigate and provide a complete characterization of the prize structures that achieve this objective in settings with many contestants. The contestants may be ex-ante asymmetric in their...

I study a principal's optimal choice of constraint for an agent participating in an auction (or auction-like allocation mechanism). I give necessary and sufficient conditions on the principal's beliefs about the value of the item for a simple budget constraint to be the optimal contract. The...

I study the efficient design of a queue to dynamically allocate a scarce resource to long-lived agents. Agents can be served multiple times, and their valuations fluctuate over time with some persistence. Each agent privately learns whether his prevailing valuation is high or low only when...

This paper addresses two central questions in markets with adverse selection: How does information impact the welfare of market participants (sellers and buyers)? Also, relatedly, what is the optimal information disclosure policy and how is it affected by the planner’s relative welfare weight...

We investigate Groves mechanisms for economies where (i) a social outcome specifies a group of winning agents, and (ii) a cost function associates each group with a monetary cost. In particular, we characterize both (i) the class of cost functions for which there are Groves mechanisms such that...

Manipulability is a threat to the successful design of centralized matching markets. However, in many applications some manipulation is inevitable and the designer wants to compare manipulable mechanisms. We count the number of agents with an incentive to manipulate and rank mechanisms by their...

We study full surplus extraction and implementation in dynamic environments. We exploit intertemporal correlations of agents' types to construct within-period ex post incentive compatible mechanisms. First, we formulate one-shot environments, in which a single agent has a hidden type and the...

We present a model of a discriminatory price auction in which a large bidder competes against many small bidders, followed by a post-auction resale stage in which the large bidder is endogenously determined to be a buyer or a seller. We extend results on first-price auctions with resale to this...