We consider a budget-constrained mechanism designer who selects an optimal set of projects to maximize her utility. Projects may differ in their value for the designer, and their cost is private information. In this allocation problem, the quantity of procured projects is endogenously determined...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a shortlisted set. Items are differentiated by observable quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. The buyer's problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. Money does not enter the buyer's objective function,...

The received characterizations of feasible interim allocations are mostly in the spirit of Border (1991): Fix a family of sets, each containing some player-types, and test the interim allocation under consideration against all these sets. In the published literature, such Border-like...

Consider the following "structured" procurement problem: A buyer wishes to procure a set of items (e.g., edges of a graph) from multiple suppliers, such that the procured items collectively form a basis of a matroid (e.g., a spanning tree of the graph). Each supplier is capable of supplying one...

Contrary to common practice in selling homes and start-ups, mechanism design theory typically recommends English (increasing price) over Dutch (decreasing price) auctions. Yet this theory neglects the uncertain investment required to investigate purchases. We show that English and other standard...

Unique-lowest sealed-bid auctions are auctions in which participation is endogenous and the winning bid is the lowest bid among all unique bids. Such auctions admit very many Nash equilibria (NEs) in pure and mixed strategies. The two-bidders' auction is similar to the Hawk-Dove game, which...

We show that the class of preferences satisfying the Gross Substitutes condition of Kelso and Crawford (1982) is strictly larger than the class of Endowed Assignment Valuations of Hatfield and Milgrom (2005), thus resolving the open question posed by the latter paper. In particular, our result...

This paper highlights connections between the discrete and continuous approaches to optimal auction design with single and multi-dimensional types. We provide an interpretaion of an optimal auction design problem in terms of a linear program that is an instance of a parametric shortest path...

We investigate the incentives for capacity investments in a simple strategic dynamic model with random demand growth. We construct non-collusive Markovian equilibria where the firms' decisions depend on the current capacity stock only. The firms maintain small reserve margins and high market...

This note establishes a revelation principle in terms of payoff for deterministic mechanisms under ex-post constraints: the maximal payoff implementable by a feasible deterministic mechanism can also be implemented by a feasible deterministic direct mechanism.