This paper considers settlement negotiations between a single defendant and N plaintiffs when there are fixed costs of litigation. When making simultaneous take-it-or-leave-it offers to the plaintiffs, the defendant adopts a divide and conquer strategy. Plaintiffs settle their claims for less...

A liquidity-constrained entrepreneur needs to raise capital to finance a business activity that may cause injuries to third parties -- the tort victims. Taking the level of borrowing as fixed, the entrepreneur finances the activity with senior (secured) debt in order to shield assets from the...

This paper considers settlement negotiations between a single defendant and N plaintiffs when there are fixed costs of litigation. When making simultaneous take-it-or-leave-it offers to the plaintiffs, the defendant adopts a divide-and-conquer strategy. Plaintiffs settle their claims for less...

A liquidity-constrained entrepreneur raises capital to finance a business activity that may harm bystanders. The entrepreneur raises senior (secured) debt to shield assets from the tort victims in bankruptcy. For a fixed level of borrowing, senior debt creates better incentives for precaution...

Peter DeMarzo, Ilan Kremer and Andrzej Skrzypacz (2005, henceforth DKS) analyzed auctions in which bidders compete in securities. They show that a steeper security leads to a higher expected revenue for the seller, and also use this to establish the revenue ranking between standard auctions. In...

The Boston mechanism is among the most popular school choice pro- cedures in use. Yet, the mechanism has been criticized for its poor incentive and welfare performances, which led the Boston Public Schools to recently replace it with Gale and Shapley's deferred acceptance algorithm (henceforth,...

We study an optimal collusion-proof auction in an environment where subsets of bidders may collude not just on their bids but also on their participation. Despite their ability to collude on participation, informational asymmetry facing the potential colluders can be exploited significantly to...

This paper develops a methodology for characterizing expected revenue from auctions when bidders' types come from an arbitrary distribution. In particular, types may be multidimensional, and there may be mass points in the distribution. One application extends existing revenue equivalence...

Yeon-Koo Che and Ian Gale (1998) studied the impact of imposing a cap on lobbying expenditures. They showed that a cap may lead to (1) greater expected aggregate expenditures and (2) a less efficient allocation of a political prize. In their comment, Todd Kaplan and David Wettstein (2005) show...

We study an optimal weak collusion-proof auction in an environment where a subset (or subsets) of bidders may collude not just on their bids but also on their participation. Despite their ability to collude on participation, informational asymmetry facing the potential colluders can be exploited...