Optimal Price Ceilings in a Common Value Auction

A simple common value auction is considered where it is optimal to set a ceiling price in addition to a reserve price. The ceiling price prevents the better informed bidder from outbidding the less informed bidders. This guarantees participation from the less informed bidders raising the seller's revenues. The seller is better off by selling the good in an auction with a price ceiling compared to selling the good at a fixed price.

Moral Hazard, Aggregate Risk and Nominal Linear Financial Contracts

We study competitive equilibria with moral hazard in economies with aggregate risk and where trading occurs with an incomplete set of financial assets. The main conclusion of the paper is that, contrary to the individual risk economies, moral hazard is compatible with trading in competitive linear financial contracts, and gives rise to no manipulation problem. We establish existence of nonmanipulable equilibria provided that there are no relative price effects (e.g., a one-commoditiy economy), and that financial markets display nonlinearly homogeneous payoffs (e.g., nominal), and are sufficiently incomplete. Finally, we justify the linear contract as the optimal pricing schedule in a specific trading game with an auctioneer.moral hazard; linear contracts

Credible Comparisons in Multi-Issue Bargaining

We find that bargaining over multiple issues as a bundle allows for credible cheap talk on the relative importance of the issues even when interests are directly opposed on each issue. This communication increases the chance of agreement by allowing the offerer to concede more on the issue of greater importance to the offeree. In contrast, if the issues are bargained over separately we find that the offeree will lie about which issue is of greater importance. The communication gains from bundling are in addition to the gains from bundling previously identified in the monopoly pricing literature. Applied to negotiations between an executive and a legislature, our results imply that bundling multiple issues in a single bill with no line-item veto increases communication and can benefit both the legislature and, in many cases, the executive as well.bundling; bargaining; cheap talk; veto

Occupational Choice, Incentives and Wealth Redistributions with Scarcity of Capital

In a matching model of firm formation with moral hazard, we characterize the equilibrium for economies with scarcity of capital and study the effects of redistributive taxation. We give necessary and sufficient conditions determining the equilibrium matching patterns, payoffs and interest rate. These depend only on aggregate wealth and the median wealth relative to the active population, compared to setup costs and technological parameters. We confirm previous results, showing that monotonic job specialization typically obtains when incentives are asymmetric within firms. Redistributive taxation now propagates its effects through the asset market and there may wealth nonmonotonic interest groups over median changes.Incentive; wealth distribution

Comparative Cheap Talk

When are comparative statements credible? For instance, when can a professor rank different students for an employer, or a stock analyst rank different stocks for a client? We show that simple complementarity conditions ensure that an expert with private information about multiple issues can credibly rank the issues for a decision maker. By restricting the expert’s ability to exaggerate, multidimensional cheap talk of this form permits communication when it would not be credible in a single dimension. The communication gains can be substantial with even a couple of issues, and the complete ranking is asymptotically equivalent to full revelation as the number of issues becomes large. Nevertheless, partial rankings are sometimes more credible and/or more profitable for the expert than the complete ranking. We confirm the robustness of comparative cheap talk to asymmetries that are not too large. Moreover, we show that for a sufficiently large number of independent issues there are always some issues sufficiently symmetric to permit influential cheap talk.multidimensional cheap talk, complementarities

Ordinal Cheap Talk

Can comparative statements be credible even when absolute statements are not? For instance, can a professor credibly rank different students for a prospective employer even if she has an incentive to exaggerate the merits of each student? Or can an analyst credibly rank different stocks even if the client would be dubious about a recommendation to buy any one of them? We examine such problems in a multidimensional sender-receiver game where the sender has private information about multiple variables. We show that ordinal cheap talk, in which the variables are completely ordered by value or grouped into categories by value, can be credible even when interests are too opposed to support communication along any single dimension. Ordinal cheap talk is credible because it reveals both favorable and unfavorable information at the same time, thereby precluding any possibility of exaggeration. The communication gains from ordinal cheap talk can be substantial with only a couple of dimensions, and the payoffs from a complete ordering are asymptotically equivalent to full revelation as the number of variables becomes large. However, in various circumstances the sender can do better through a partial ordering that categorizes variables. Compared to other forms of cheap talk, ordinal cheap talk is exceedingly simple in that the sender only makes straightforward, comparative statements.cheap talk; credibility; communication

Seller Cheap Talk in Common Value Auctions

Sellers benefit on average from revealing information about their goods to buyers, but the incentive to exaggerate undermines the credibility of seller statements. When multiple goods are being auctioned, we show that ordinal cheap talk, which reveals a complete or partial ordering of the different goods by value, can be credible. Ordinal statements are not susceptible to exaggeration because they simultaneously reveal favorable information about some goods and unfavorable information about other goods. Any informative ordering increases revenues in accordance with the linkage principle, and the complete ordering is asymptotically revenue-equivalent to full revelation as the number of goods becomes large. These results provide a new explanation in addition to bundling, versioning, and complementarities for how a seller benefits from the sale of multiple goods.cheap talk; linkage principle; winner's curse; auctions

Best Foot Forward or Best for Last in a Sequential Auction?

Should an informed seller of multiple goods sell the best goods first to make a favorable impression on buyers, or instead hold back on the best goods until buyers have learned more from earlier sales? To help answer this question we consider the sequential auction of two goods by a seller with private information about their values. We find that the seller's sequencing strategy endogenously generates correlation in the values of the goods across periods, thereby giving the seller an incentive to impress buyers by leading with the better good. This impression effect implies that selling the better good first is the unique equilibrium in many situations, and that selling the better good last is never a unique equilibrium. Nevertheless, if the seller could commit to a sequencing strategy, revenues would often be higher from waiting to sell the better good last. Either sequencing strategy reveals the seller's ranking of the goods and thereby, due to the linkage principle, generates higher revenues than either randomly selling the goods or selling them simultaneously.sequential auction; impression effect; linkage principle; declining price anomaly