We consider innovation contests for the procurement of an innovation under moral hazard and adverse selection. Innovators have private information about their abilities, and choose unobservable effort in order to produce innovations of random quality. Innovation quality is not contractible. We...

We study efficient auction design for a single indivisible object when bidders have interdependent values and non-quasilinear preferences. Instead of quasilinearity, we assume only that bidders have positive wealth effects. Our setting nests cases where bidders are ex ante asymmetric, face...

We compare equilibrium bidding in uniform-price and discriminatory auctions when a single large bidder (i.e., with multi-unit demand) competes against many small bidders, each with single-unit demands. We show that the large bidder prefers the discriminatory auction over the uniform-price...

We study manipulation via endowments in a market in an auction setting with multiple goods. In the market, there are buyers whose valuations are their private information, and a seller whose set of endowments is her private information. A social planner, who wants to implement a socially...

I study multi-unit auction design when bidders have private values, multi-unit demands, and non-quasilinear preferences. Without quasilinearity, the Vickrey auction loses its desired incentive and efficiency properties. I give conditions under which we can design a mechanism that retains the...

We conduct laboratory experiments for the multi-unit Vickrey auction with and without advice to subjects on strategy-proofness. The rate of truth-telling among the subjects without advice stays at 20%, whereas the rate increases to 47% among those who have received advice. By conducting similar...

We conduct laboratory experiments for the multi-unit Vickrey auction with and without providing advice to subjects on strategy-proofness. Although the rate of truth-telling among the subjects stays at 20% without advice, the rate increases to 47% with advice. By conducting similar experiments...

A risk-neutral principal considers hiring one agent to improve a valuable, observable outcome. Who to hire? How to motivate? In this paper, the principal designs an incentive contract that pays according to the realized outcome and sells the contract to an agent through an auction. The paper...

We propose a simple mechanism, the Continental auction, to allocate a good in a one-to-many bilateral trade problem. This problem is akin to that of a monopolist auctioning a single good, with the special characteristic that both seller and buyer valuations are private. Due to this feature, the...

We study optimal mechanisms for a utilitarian designer who seeks to assign a finite number of goods to a group of ex ante heterogeneous agents with unit demand. The agents have heterogeneous marginal utilities of money, which may naturally arise in environments where agents have different wealth...