We introduce intention-based social preferences into a Bayesian mechanism design framework. We first show that, under common knowledge of social preferences, any tension between material efficiency, incentive compatibility, and voluntary participation can be resolved. Hence, famous impossibility...

Behavioral robustness is essential in mechanism design. Existing papers focus on robustness as captured by dominant strategies. This paper studies the novel concept of externality-robustness, which addresses players' motives to affect other players' monetary payoffs. One example is externalities...

A nudge is a paternalistic government intervention that attempts to improve choices by changing the framing of a decision problem. We propose a welfare-theoretic foundation for nudging similar in spirit to the classical revealed preference approach, by investigating a model where preferences and...

This paper studies the impact of the presence of human subjects in the role of a seller on bidding in experimental second-price auctions. Overbidding is a robust finding in second- price auctions, and spite among bidders has been advanced as an explanation. If spite extends to the seller, then...

We study optimal incentive contracts with multiple agents when performance evaluation is delegated to a reviewer. The reviewer may be biased in favor of the agents, but the degree of the bias is unknown to the principal. We show that a contest, which is a contract in which the principal...

We consider the design of contests for n agents when the principal can choose both the prize profile and the contest success function. Our framework includes Tullock contests, Lazear-Rosen tournaments and all-pay contests as special cases, among others. We show that the optimal contest has an...

We examine equilibria in competitive insurance markets when individuals take unobservable labor supply decisions. Precautionary labor motives intro-duce countervailing incentives in the insurance market, and equilibria with positive profits can occur even in the standard case in which...

We study optimal incentive contracts with multiple agents when performance is evaluated by a reviewer. The reviewer may be biased in favor of the agents, but the degree of bias is unknown to the principal. We show that a contest, which is a contract in which the principal fixes a set of prizes...

In the presence of a time-inconsistency problem with optimal agency contracts, we show that competitive markets implement allocations that Pareto dominate those achieved by a benevolent planner, they induce strictly more effort, and they sometimes make the commitment problem disappear entirely....

An auction is externality-robust if unilateral deviations from equilibrium leave the other bidders’ payoffs unaffected. The equilibrium and its outcome will then persist if certain types of externalities arise between bidders. One example are externalities due to spiteful preferences, which...