This paper studies mechanisms for allocating rights to forge new blocks on a blockchain. The proof of work contest (PoW) where all block generators, or miners, compete for finding the next block is characterized. The central feature of the PoW contest is that no miner has an incentive to...

This paper shows that a monopolistic certifying party can have incentives to disclose revealing information about the agent he is certifying. Using a three-person game-theoretic model and allowing certificate users (buyers) to have noisy estimates of the quality level of the agent being...

I model access to influence as a two-sided matching market between a continuum of experts and two vertically differentiated gatekeepers under sequential directed search. Real-world examples include academic publishing, venture capital, job search or political agenda setting. The equilibrium is...

I model access to influence as a two-sided matching market between a continuum of experts and a finite number of gatekeepers under sequential directed search. Real-world examples include academic publishing, venture capitalism or political agenda setting. Uniqueness of the resulting equilibrium...

Potential bidders respond to a seller's choice of auction mechanism for a common-value or affiliated-values asset by endogenous decisions whether to incur an information-acquisition cost (and observe a private estimate), or forgo competing. Privately informed participants decide whether to incur...

We consider a model of oligopolistic firms that have private information about their cost structure. Prior to competing in the market a competitive advantage, i.e., a cost reducing technology, is allocated to a subset of the firms by means of a multi-object auction. After the auction either all...

We analyze the doping behavior of heterogeneous athletes in an environment of private information. In a n-player strategic game, modeled as an all-pay auction, each athlete has private information about his actual physical ability and choses the amount of performance-enhancing drugs. The use of...

Suppliers often make proactive investments in capacity to strategically position themselves to win a contract with a monopolist buyer. Such investments reduce the suppliers' variable costs of serving the buyer's demand. We show that an auction mechanism does not always benefit the...

We consider a general mechanism design setting where each agent can acquire covert information before participating in the mechanism. The central question is whether a mechanism exists which provides the efficient incentives for information acquisition ex-ante and implements the efficient...

We describe a methodology for making counterfactual predictions when the information held by strategic agents is a latent parameter. The analyst observes behavior which is rationalized by a Bayesian model in which agents maximize expected utility, given partial and differential information...