Random mechanisms have been used in real-life situations for reasons such as fairness. Voting and matching are two examples of such situations. We investigate whether desirable properties of a random mechanism survive decomposition of the mechanism as a lottery over deterministic mechanisms that...

A buyer wishes to purchase a good from a seller who chooses a sequence of prices over time. Each period the buyer can also exercise an outside option, abandoning their search or moving on to another seller. We show there is a unique equilibrium in which the seller charges a constant price in...

Allocation and exchange of discrete resources such as kidneys, school seats, and many other resources for which agents have single-unit demand is conducted via direct mechanisms without monetary transfers. Incentive compatibility and efficiency are primary concerns in designing such mechanisms....

This paper studies the relative performance of various formats for selling divisible goods. We analyze the two most common auction formats, the uniform price and discriminatory price designs, and contrast them with the Vickrey and the optimal mechanisms. We derive and characterize the unique...

Auctions often involve the sale of many related goods: Treasury, spectrum, and electricity auctions are examples. In multi-unit auctions, bids for marginal units may affect payments for inframarginal units, giving rise to “demand reduction” and furthermore to incentives for shading bids...