We explain how the common practice of size-discovery trade detracts from overallfinancial market efficiency. At each of a series of size-discovery sessions, traders report theirdesired trades, generating allocations of the asset and cash that rely on the most recent exchangeprice. Traders can...

We consider the problem faced by a procurement agency that runs a mechanism for constructing an assortment of differentiated products with posted prices, from which heterogeneous consumers buy their most preferred alternative. Procurement mechanisms used by large organizations, including...

Although the literature on assignment mechanisms emphasizes the importance of efficiency based on agents' preferences, policymakers may want to achieve different goals. For instance, school districts may want to affect student learning outcomes but must take teacher welfare into account when...

We study intermediaries who seek to maximize gains from trade in bilateral negotiations. Intermediaries are players: they cannot commit to act against their objective function and deny, in some cases, trade they believe to be beneficial. This impairs their ability to assist the parties relative...

In mechanism design, Myerson regularity is often too weak for a quantitative analysis of performance. For instance, ratios between revenue and welfare, or sales probabilities may vanish at the boundary of Myerson regularity. This paper therefore explores the quantitative version of Myerson...

I study a principal's optimal choice of constraint for an agent participating in an auction (or auction-like allocation mechanism). I give necessary and sufficient conditions on the principal's beliefs about the value of the item for a simple budget constraint to be the optimal contract. The...

We introduce a general class of simplicity standards that vary the foresight abilities required of agents in extensive-form games. Rather than planning for the entire future of a game, agents are presumed to be able to plan only for those histories they view as simple from their current...

Many sales, sports, and research contests are put in place to maximize contestants’ performance. We investigate and provide a complete characterization of the prize structures that achieve this objective in settings with many contestants. The contestants may be ex-ante asymmetric in their...

I study the efficient design of a queue to dynamically allocate a scarce resource to long‐lived agents. Agents can be served multiple times, and their valuations fluctuate over time with some persistence. Each agent privately learns whether his prevailing valuation is high or low only when...

Although the literature on assignment mechanisms emphasizes the importance of efficiency based on agents' preferences, policymakers may want to achieve different goals. For instance, school districts may want to affect student learning outcomes but must take teacher welfare into account when...