We study mechanism design in dynamic quasilinear environments where private information arrives over time and decisions are made over multiple periods. We make three contributions. First, we provide a necessary condition for incentive compatibility that takes the form of an envelope formula for...

We examine the design of incentive-compatible screening mechanisms for dynamic environments in which the agents types follow a (possibly non-Markov) stochastic process, decisions may be made over time and may affect the type process, and payoffs need not be time-separable. We derive a formula...

We characterize the optimal incentive scheme for a manager who faces costly effort decisions and whose ability to generate profits for the fim varies stochastically over time. The optimal contract is obtained as the solution to a dynamic mechanism design problem with hidden actions and...

This paper studies second-degree price discrimination in matching markets, that is, in markets where the product sold by the monopolist is access to other agents. In order to investigate the optimality of a large variety of pricing strategies, we allow for any many-to-many matching rule that...

Our analysis offers a different rationale for the failure of the Atkinson-Stiglitz theorem than that of Naito (1999). Moreover, our results are in sharp contrast to those of Saez (2004) and Scheuer (2012), who considers an occupational choice model where workers have heterogeneous idiosyncratic...

This paper studies optimal taxation in a class of economies in which agents have dispersed private information regarding aggregate shocks (commonly-relevant fundamentals such as aggregate productivity and demand conditions). The dispersion of information opens the door to inefficiencies that...

I extend Myersonʼs [R. Myerson, Optimal auction design, Math. Oper. Res. 6 (1981) 58–73] ironing technique to more general objective functions. The approach is based on a generalized notion of virtual surplus which can be maximized pointwise even when the monotonicity constraint implied by...

We argue that a patent system makes collusion among innovators more difficult. Our simple argument is based on two properties of the patent system. First, a patent not only protects against infringement but also against retaliation by former collusion members. Second, a deviator has an equal...

We study repeated Bayesian n-player games in which the players' privately known types evolve according an irreducible Markov chain. Our main result shows that, with communication, any Pareto-efficient payoff vector above a stationary minmax value can be approximated arbitrarily closely in a...