This paper explores the sale of an object to an ambiguity averse buyer. We show that the seller can increase his profit by using an ambiguous mechanism. That is, the seller can benefit from hiding certain features of the mechanism that he has committed to from the agent. We then characterize the...

We study optimal selling strategies of a seller who is poorly informed about the buyer’s value for the object. When the maxmin seller only knows that the mean of the distribution of the buyer's valuations belongs to some interval then nature can keep him to payoff zero no matter how much...

In this paper, we examine the optimal mechanism design of selling an indivisible object to one regular buyer and one publicly known buyer, where inter-buyer resale cannot be prohibited. The resale market is modeled as a stochastic ultimatum bargaining game between the two buyers. We fully...

When partnerships come to an end, partners must find a way to efficiently reallocate the commonly owned assets to those who value them the most. This requires that the aforementioned members possess enough financial resources to buy out the others’ shares. I investigate ex post efficient...

This paper studies an informed mechanism designer problem in which the principal’s private information is a number of agents. We define mechanical equivalence such that it holds if each agent’s and the principal’s perspectives are consistent in the sense that a conversion problem for a...

We study informed principal problems in a bilateral trade environment in which a seller and a buyer have private information about types affecting their interdependent valuations. Their types might be affiliated and the traders might have different prior beliefs. The informed seller has full...

Neeman (2004) and Heifetz and Neeman (2006) have shown that, in auctions with incomplete information about payoffs, full surplus extraction is only possible if agents’ beliefs about other agents are fully informative about their own payoff parameters. They argue that the set of...

McAfee and Reny (1992) have given a necessary and sufficient condition for full surplus extraction in models with a continuum of types. We interpret their condition as significantly stronger version of the requirement of injectiveness of the function mapping abstract types into beliefs and prove...

I study a mechanism design problem of allocating a single good to an agent when the mechanism is followed by a post-mechanism game (aftermarket) played between the agent and a third-party. The aftermarket is beyond the direct control of the designer. However, she can influence the information...

I study the interaction between optimal procurement and outsourcing of production in small industries. First, two sellers decide about outsourcing. By outsourcing, a seller loses information about the costs of producing to his supplier. Then the buyer designs the procurement mechanism and...