The Introduction to the Symposium Issue on “Dynamic Contract and Mechanism Design” of the Journal of Economic Theory provides an overview of the dynamic mechanism design literature. We then introduce the papers that are contained in the Symposium issue and finally conclude by discussing...

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...

Blockchain implementations of auctions have to deal with the problem of front-running: block production happens at discrete intervals, and anyone can inspect and react to the incoming bids before they are written on chain. The presence of smart contracts among bidders, a hallmark of automated...

Weak contract enforcement may reduce the efficiency of investment in developing countries. I study how contract enforcement affects efficiency in procurement auctions for the largest power projects in India. I gather data on bidding and ex post contract renegotiation and find that the...

This paper studies cost-plus-time (A+B) procurement contracting with time incentives in the highway construction industry. In the presence of construction uncertainty, the contractor’s actual completion time may deviate from the bid completion time, and the A+B contract design is not ex-post...

Motivated by challenges facing IT procurement, this paper studies a hybrid procurement model where a reverse auction of a fixed-price IT outsourcing contract may be followed by renegotiation to extend the contract's scope. In this model, the buyer balances the need to incentivize...

The optimal duration of a supply contract balances the costs of re-selecting a supplier against the costs of being matched to an inefficient supplier when the contract lasts too long. I develop a structural model of contract duration that captures this tradeoff and provide an empirical strategy...

This paper studies procurement contracts where a buyer can either divide full production among multiple suppliers or award the entire production to a single supplier. We examine the effect of using multiple suppliers on investment incentives. In a framework of generalized second-price auctions...

Private participation in road projects is increasing around the world. The most popular franchising mechanism is a concession contract, which allows a private firm to charge tolls to road users during a pre-determined period in order to recover its investments. Concessionaires are usually...