Working Papers

Previous version of “Mechanism Design for Acquisition of/Stochastic Evidence,” with Elchanan Ben-Porath and Eddie Dekel.  I keep the previous version here as it  contains our result on value to commitment.  The published version in Theoretical Economics does not include this result as we are moving it to a new paper.  In the meantime, you can find that result in Section 5 of this version.

“Sequential Mechanisms for Evidence Acquisition,” with Elchanan Ben-Porath and Eddie Dekel, current draft, August 2026.

“Supplemental Appendix for ‘Sequential Mechanisms for Evidence Acquisition,’” with Elchanan Ben-Porath and Eddie Dekel, August 2026.

“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…

One reason for not publishing this paper is that a still simpler proof is in our 2019 Econometrica, exploiting the relationship between Dye evidence and costly verification which we show there.