We study the relation between mechanism design and voting in public-good provision. If incentive mechanisms must satisfy conditions of coalition-proofness and robustness, as well as individual incentive compatibility, the participants' contributions to public-good provision can only depend on...

The Introduction to the Symposium Issue on “Dynamic Contract and Mechanism Design” of the Journal of Economic Theory provides an overview of the dynamic mechanism design literature. We then introduce the papers that are contained in the Symposium issue and finally conclude by discussing...

Shortage is common in many markets, such as those for human organs or blood, but the problem is often difficult to solve through price adjustment, given safety and ethical concerns. In this paper, we investigate whether market designers can use non-price methods to address shortage....

We compare beauty contests with first-price sealed-bid and scoring auctions, using data on public procurement of cleaning services in Swedish municipalities. The lowest submitted and winning bids are similar in all auction designs despite a higher price sensitivity of procurement bureaucrats in...

Using novel survey data on technology licensing, we report the first empirical evidence linking the three main sources of failure emphasized in the market design literature (lack of market thickness, congestion, lack of market safety) to deal outcomes. We disaggregate the licensing process into...

We consider a market for indivisible items with m buyers, each of whom wishes to buy at most one item, and m sellers, each of whom has one item to sell. The traders privately know their values/costs, which are statistically dependent. Two mechanisms for trading are considered. The buyer's bid...

The procurement of an innovation involves motivating a research effort to generate a new idea and then implementing that idea efficiently. If research efforts are unverifiable and implementation costs are private information, a trade-off arises between the two objectives. The optimal mechanism...

Central counterparties (CCPs) have become pillars of the new global financial architecture following the financial crisis of 2008. The key role of CCPs in mitigating counterparty risk and contagion has in turn cast them as systemically important financial institutions whose eventual failure may...

A growing number of school districts use centralized assignment mechanisms to allocate school seats in a manner that reflects student preferences and school priorities. Many of these assignment schemes use lotteries to ration seats when schools are oversubscribed. The resulting random assignment...

Size-discovery trade mechanisms allow large quantities of an asset to be exchanged at a price that does not respond to price pressure. Primary examples include "workup" in Treasury markets, "matching sessions" in corporate bond and CDS markets, and block-trading "dark pools" in equity markets....