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...

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...

Many blame the recent financial market turmoil on malfeasance of ratings agencies, who had incentives to bias their ratings. But these incentives had existed for decades. Why did the ratings bias issue only recently emerge? We model asset issuers who can shop for ratings -- observe multiple...

Legal provisions that protect politicians from arrest and prosecution exist throughout much of the modern democratic world. Why, and with what effects, do societies choose to place their politicians above the law? We examine the institution of immunity both theoretically and empirically. Our...

This paper establishes that posting a price in each period is a revenue-maximizing allocation mechanism in a finite period model without commitment. A risk-neutral seller has one object to sell and faces a risk-neutral buyer whose valuation is private information and drawn from an arbitrary...

We study asymmetric partnerships and show that efficient dissolution is possible if critical types (where participation constraints bind) are equal. Ownership structures guaranteeing equal critical types always exist, but can be extremely unequal.