Mechanism design with financially constrained agents and costly verification

A principal distributes an indivisible good to budget‐constrained agents when both valuation and budget are agents' private information. The principal can verify an agent's budget at a cost. The welfare‐maximizing mechanism can be implemented via a two‐stage scheme. First, agents report their budgets, receive cash transfers, and decide whether to enter a lottery over the good. Second, recipients of the good can sell it on a resale market but must pay a sales tax. Low‐budget agents receive a higher cash transfer, pay a lower price to enter the lottery, and face a higher sales tax. They are also randomly inspected.

Integration of Primary and Resale Platforms

Consumers can buy concert tickets from primary platforms (e.g., Ticketmaster) or from consumer-to-consumer resale platforms (e.g., StubHub). Recently, Ticketmaster has entered and been trying to control the resale market by prohibiting consumers from reselling on competing resale platforms. Several states in the United States have passed or are discussing laws requiring tickets to be transferrable on any resale sites, worrying that platform integration—Ticketmaster controlling both the primary and the resale platforms—will increase ticket service fees and harm musicians and consumers. This article establishes a game-theoretic framework and shows that the opposite can happen: platform integration can lower the service fees in both markets, alleviating double marginalization in the primary market and benefiting the musician and consumers. Moreover, with platform integration, the presence of a small number of scalpers can counterintuitively reduce the ticket price and benefit the musicians and consumers. In addition, platform competition in the resale market may harm consumers. This article further shows that these insights apply in other markets (e.g. used goods, peer-to-peer product-sharing markets) and provides suggestive empirical support for the theoretical results.