In a Vickrey auction, if one bidder can invest to increase his value, the combined mechanism including investments is still fully optimal. By contrast, for any β 1, there exist monotone allocation rules that guarantee a fraction β of the allocative optimum in the worst case, but such that the...

Recent years have seen an explosion of scholarship on “personalized law.” Commentators foresee a world in which regulators armed with big data and machine learning techniques determine the optimal legal rule for every regulated party, then instantaneously disseminate their decisions via...

This note extends the Brock and Durlauf (2001) model of discrete choice with social interactions to a setting with multiple locations. This generalization leads to a closed-form measure of the quot;social multiplierquot; akin to that of Glaeser, Sacerdote, and Scheinkman (2003). The dynamics of...

Building upon the static model of Athey and Ellison (2008), we demonstrate the efficient convergence of dynamic position auctions in the presence of consumer search. The entry of low-quality advertisers does not slow this convergence. Our methods are extensions of those introduced by Cary et al....

This paper studies the effects of judicial salary erosion on federal judicial resignation levels using biographical data on federal judges. Our study is the first to study resignation levels exclusively and is the first to examine the post-resignation employment of federal judges. Prior...

Human information processing is often modeled as costless Bayesian inference. However, research in psychology shows that attention is a computationally costly and potentially limited resource. We thus study Bayesian agents for whom computing posterior beliefs is costly; such agents face a...

Drawing on classical insights from mechanism design, we show that ex post efficient mechanisms induce agents to make efficient ex ante investment choices if and only if they are strategy-proof. For mechanisms that fail to be exactly strategy-proof and/or efficient, we derive a correspondence...

We show that increased litigation risk has driven innovators to shield themselves by shifting innovation out of industry and into universities. We show both theoretically and empirically that litigation by non-practicing entities (NPEs) pushes innovation to spaces with reduced litigation threat....

We survey the empirical literature on non-practicing entity (NPE) litigation behavior and its consequences. We document both aggregate trends and cross-sectional differences amongst various types of NPEs. Survey evidence illustrates a number of ways in which NPEs can potentially act...

The patent system is commonly justified as a way to promote social welfare and, more specifically, technological progress. For years, however, there has been concern that patent litigation is undermining, rather than furthering, these goals. Particularly in the United States, the time, cost, and...