Majority rules are frequently used to decide whether or not a public good should be provided, but will typically fail to achieve an efficient provision. We provide a worst-case analysis of the majority rule with an optimally chosen majority threshold, assuming that voters have independent...

Since the seminal work by Rothschild and Stiglitz on competitive insurance markets under adverse selection the problem of non-existence of equilibrium has puzzled many economists. In this paper we approach this problem from an evo- lutionary point of view. In a dynamic model insurance companies...

We show that, in environments with independent private values and transferable utility, a privately informed principal can implement a contract that is ex-ante optimal for her. As an application, we consider a bilateral exchange environment (Myerson and Satterthwaite, 1983) in which the...

We consider collective choice from two alternatives. Ex-ante, each agent is uncertain about which alternative she prefers, and may be uncertain about the intensity of her preferences. An environment is given by a probability distribution over utility vectors that is symmetric across agents and...

In standard auctions with symmetric, independent private value bidders resale creates a role for a speculator—a bidder who is commonly known to have no use value for the good on sale. For second-price and English auctions the efficient value-bidding equilibrium coexists with a continuum...

Zheng has proposed a seller-optimal auction for (asymmetric) independent-privatevalue environments where inter-bidder resale is possible. Zheng’s construction requires novel conditions — Resale Monotonicity, Transitivity, and Invariance — on the bidders’ value...

Majority rules are frequently used to decide whether or not a public good should be provided, but will typically fail to achieve an efficient provision. We provide a worst-case analysis of the majority rule with an optimally chosen majority threshold, assuming that voters have independent...