We propose a design for philanthropic or publicly-funded seeding to allow (near) optimal provision of a decentralized, self-organizing ecosystem of public goods. The concept extends ideas from Quadratic Voting to a funding mechanism for endogenous community formation. Citizens make public goods...

The original motivations of antitrust suggest an alternative remedy for market power: changes to corporate governance to include stakeholders who are subject to this power. In contrast to structural and behavioral remedies, “stakeholder remedies,” as we call them, have several desirable...

I draw on contemporary debates in political philosophy to understand the limits and hazards of using mechanism design to offer technical solutions to problems in which technical and social issues are intertwined. Using Boston's experience with K-12 school choice reform over the last half century...

Eric Posner and Glen Weyl's Radical Markets is dedicated to Vickrey and opens with a preface titled “The Auction Will Set You Free.” Vickrey's ideas offer a middle ground, according to Posner and Weyl, between the Right's view that markets must be “strengthened, expanded and purified”...

We propose a general model of imperfect competition among multi-productfirms, the consumption of whose goods yields externalities from oneconsumer to another. We extend the allocation approach of Weyl (2010)'smonopoly model, proposing a solution concept, Insulated Equilibrium,that allows for...

In an economy with indivisible goods, a continuum of agents and quasilinear utility, we show that equilibrium exists regardless of the nature of agents' preferences over bundles. This contrasts with results for economies with a finite number of agents, which require restrictions on preferences...

Many models of monopoly in two-sided markets have been proposed (Rochet and Tirole, 2006), but little is known about them. I provide a full set of comparative statics for three models, one that generalizes that of Rochet and Tirole (2003), a second that generalizes Armstrong (2006) and a third...

One of the most salient issues faced by platforms like newspapers and credit card issuers is that users are heterogeneous in the value they bring to other users or to the platform. We develop a model with multi-dimensional heterogeneity where a monopoly platform chooses (price or non-price)...

The externalities advertisers receive from newspaper readers and that operating system users receive from software developers are among the leading features of those “platform” industries. However, they are rarely incorporated into applied models of imperfect competition. We argue this...

In an economy with indivisible goods, a continuum of agents and quasilinear utility, we show that equilibrium exists regardless of the nature of agents' preferences over bundles. This contrasts with results for economies with a finite number of agents, which require restrictions on preferences...