We study the design of credit default swaps (CDS) auctions, which determine the payments by CDS sellers to CDS buyers following defaults of bonds. Using a simple model, we find that the current design of CDS auctions leads to biased prices and inefficient allocations. This is because various restrictions imposed in CDS auctions prevent certain investors from participating in the price discovery and allocation process. The imposition of a price cap or floor also gives dealers large influence on the final auction price. We propose an alternative double auction design that delivers more efficient price discovery and allocations.

We study the design of optimal mechanisms when the designer is uncertain both about the form of information held by the agents and also about which equilibrium will be played. The guarantee of a mechanism is its worst performance across all information structures and equilibria. The potential of an information structure is its best performance across all mechanisms and equilibria. We formulate a pair of linear programs, one of which is a lower bound on the maximum guarantee across all mechanisms, and the other of which is an upper bound on the minimum potential across all information structures. In applications to public expenditure, bilateral trade, and optimal auctions, we use the bounding programs to characterize guarantee‐maximizing mechanisms and potential‐minimizing information structures and show that the max guarantee is equal to the min potential.