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 Working Papers 

Playing Favorites with Inattentive Buyers [Draft]

• • This paper examines how a seller should design mechanisms when buyers can pay to acquire information. With two identical buyers, symmetric allocation weakens incentives to gather information, while playing favorites lets the seller favor one buyer, encouraging inspection. The seller may therefore optimally treat buyers unequally, depending on information costs and its curvature.

  • Presented at: Midwest Theory Conference, 2025 Yonsei Emerging Researchers Forum, Stony Brook International Conference on Game Theory, 2025 World Congress of the Econometric Society

Inattentive Buyers with Interdependent Signals

• This paper studies optimal mechanism design when buyers with interdependent signals can pay to acquire information. In the simultaneous case, buyers are harder to incentivize to acquire information, but the seller can capture more rent when the value is high. In the sequential case, the first buyer’s rejection reveals low value to the second buyer, which reduces the seller’s ability to extract surplus.