We design a non-clairvoyant dynamic mechanism under budget and ex-post individual rationality constraints that is dynamic incentive-compatible and achieves non-trivial revenue performance, even without any knowledge about the future. In particular, our dynamic mechanism obtains a constant...

We introduce a new family of dynamic mechanisms that restricts sellers from using future distributional knowledge. Since the allocation and pricing of each auction period do not depend on the type distributions of future periods, we call this family of dynamic mechanisms non-clairvoyant.We...

We model new experience goods in the context of dynamic mechanism design. These are goods for which an agent is unsure of her valuation but can learn it through consumption experience. We consider a dynamic environment with a single buyer and seller in which contracting occurs over T periods,...

Dynamic mechanisms are a powerful technique in designing revenue-maximizing repeated auctions. Despite their strength, these types of mechanisms have not been widely adopted in practice for several reasons, e.g., for their complexity, and for their sensitivity to the accuracy of predicting...

We consider a takeover in which risk neutral bidders incur private costs to participate to the auction. Supposing that valuations for target firm are common knowledge, we study the optimal strategy of bidders and analyze the takeover result when they get or not toeholds in the target firm. We...

A principal, who wants prices to be as lowas possible, contracts with agents who would like to charge the monopoly price. The principal chooses between a Demsetz auction, which awards an exclusive contract to the agent bidding the lowest price (competition for the field) and having two agents...

Online "feedback mechanisms" - also known as "reputation systems" - have been implemented in the most important private e-markets, such as eBay, Yahoo!, Amazon to foster trust and cooperation among trading partners. In this paper we discuss the main issues relevant for the optimal design of such...

McAfee and Reny (1992) have given a necessary and sufficient condition for full surplus extraction in naive type spaces with a continuum of payoff types. We generalize their characterization to arbitrary abstract type spaces and to the universal type space and show that in each setting, full...