This paper studies an informed mechanism designer problem in which the principal’s private information is a number of agents. We define mechanical equivalence such that it holds if each agent’s and the principal’s perspectives are consistent in the sense that a conversion problem for a...

We study all-pay auctions with private and affiliated binary values. To increase revenue (i.e., expected aggregate bid), the auction organizer can commit ex ante to fully disclosing or concealing bidders’ valuations. We find that full disclosure, as opposed to full concealment, always...

We study all-pay auctions with one-sided private information and interdependent valuations. To sharpen the competition and maximize revenue, the auction organizer can design an information disclosure policy through Bayesian persuasion about the bidder with private information. We characterize...

In a number of observed procurements, the buyer has employed an auction format that allows for a split-award outcome. We focus on settings where the range of uncertainty regarding scale economies is large and, depending on cost realizations, the efficient allocations include split-award outcomes...

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 consider imperfectly discriminating, common-value, all-pay auctions (or contests) where some players know the value of the prize, others do not. We show that if the prize is always of positive value, then all players are active in equilibrium. If the prize is of value zero with positive...

We prove the existence of monotonic pure strategy equilibrium for many types of asymmetric auctions with n bidders and unitary demands, interdependent values and independent types. The assumptions require monotonicity only in the own bidder's type. The payments can be a function of all bids....

We study informed principal problems in a bilateral trade environment in which a seller and a buyer have private information about types affecting their interdependent valuations. Their types might be affiliated and the traders might have different prior beliefs. The informed seller has full...

We consider common-value hybrid auctions among two asymmetrically informed bidders, where the winning bidder pays his bid with some positive probability k and the losing bid otherwise. Under the assumption of discrete and affiliated signals, we give an explicit characterization of the (unique)...

In many real-life contests, contestants do not know their own type (e.g., value or ability) prior to a competition; and contestants’ types, which are observed privately once entering the contest, are often correlated with each other. We study a two-stage contest in which two players with...