I study the optimal supply of exible commitment devices to people who value both commitment and exibility, and whose preferences exhibit varying degrees of time incon- sistency. I …nd that, if time inconsistency is observable, then both a monopolist and a planner supply devices that enable each...

How should a coalition of cooperating players allocate payoffs to its members? This question arises in a broad range of situations and evokes an equally broad range of issues. For example, it raises technical issues in accounting, if the players are divisions of a corporation, but involves...

We consider discriminatory auctions for multiple identical units of a good. Players have private values, possibly for multiple units. None of the usual assumptions about symmetry of players' distributions over values or of their equilibrium play are made. Because of this, equilibria will...

This paper considers dynamic games in which multiple principals contract sequentially and non-cooperatively with the same agent and provides characterization results useful for applications. Our benchmark model is one of private contracting in which downstream principals do not observe upstream...

This paper takes a mechanism design approach to federalism and assumes that local preferences are the private information of local jurisdictions. Contractual federalism is defined as a strategy-proof contract among the members of the federation supervised by a benevolent but not omniscient...

We study monopoly and duopoly pricing in a two-sided market with dispersed information about users’ preferences. First, we show how the dispersion of information introduces idiosyncratic uncertainty about participation rates and how the latter shapes the elasticity of the demands and thereby...

We study the optimal dynamics of incentives for a manager whose ability to generate cash ows changes stochastically with time and is his private information. We show that, in general, the power of incentives (or "pay for performance") may either increase or decrease with tenure. However, risk...

We study centralized many-to-many matching in markets where agents have private information about (vertical) characteristics that determine match values. Our analysis reveals how matching patterns reflect cross-subsidization between sides. Agents are endogenously partitioned into consumers and...

We study a market in which k identical and indivisible objects are allocated using a uniform-price auction where n k bidders each demand one object. Before the auction, each bidder receives an informative but imperfect signal about the state of the world. The good that is auctioned is a...