Working Papers

“Sequential Mechanisms for Evidence Acquisition,” with Elchanan Ben-Porath and Eddie Dekel, current draft, April 2024.

“Supplemental Appendix for ‘Sequential Mechanisms for Evidence Acquisition,’” with Elchanan Ben-Porath and Eddie Dekel, June 2023.

“Mechanism Design for Acquisition of/Stochastic Evidence,” with Elchanan Ben-Porath and Eddie Dekel, first preliminary draft September 2019, current draft December 2023.

“An Elementary Proof of the Optimality of Threshold Mechanisms,” first draft June 2015, current draft July 2015.

I’m unlikely to ever submit this paper.  It contains a much simpler proof of the main result in Ben-Porath, Dekel, and Lipman, “Optimal Allocation with Costly Verification,” and I wrote it out of frustration with the messy argument there.  Yes, as Ricky Vohra says, the proof in the AER is a mess.  Unlike Ricky’s proof, this very simple one doesn’t assume finitely many IID types.  But Ricky is right about the reduced form…  Well, live and learn…

“Why is Language Vague?,” current draft November 2009.

I still don’t know why, but I have some thoughts.  Expect to see an update of this paper sometime in the next decade or so…