We consider situations where a society tries to efficiently allocate several homogeneous and indivisible goods among agents. Each agent receives at most one unit of the good. For example, suppose that a government wishes to allocate a fixed number of licenses to operate in its country to private...

We analyze two well-known matching mechanisms-the Gale-Shapley, and the Top Trading Cycles (TTC) mechanisms-in the experimental lab in three different informational settings, and study the role of information in individual decision making. Our results suggest that-in line with the theory-in the...

In this article we define and characterize a class of asymmetric leximin solutions, that contains both the symmetric leximin solution of Imai[5] and the two-person asymmetric Kalai-Smorodinsky solution of Dubra [3] as special cases. Solutions in this class combine three attractive features: they...

This paper studies the possibility of strategy-proof rules yielding satisfactory solutions to matching problems. Alcalde and Barberá (1994) show that effcient and individually rational matching rules are manipulable in the one-to-one matching model. We pursue the possibility of strategy-proof...

This paper studies the application of the notion of secure implementation (Cason, Saijo, Sjöström, and Yamato, 2006; Saijo, Sjöström, and Yamato, 2007) to the problem of allocating indivisible objects with monetary transfers. We propose a new domain-richness condition, termed as minimal...

This paper considers the object allocation problem introduced by Shapley and Scarf (1974). We study secure implementation (Saijo, Sjöström, and Yamato, 2007), that is, double implementation in dominant strategy and Nash equilibria. We prove that (i) an individually rational solution is...

This paper explores the consequences of sabotage for the design of incentive contracts. The possibility of sabotage gives rise to a dynamic concern, similar to the Ratchet effect, which distorts the agents' incentives. We first show that the mere possibility of sabotage may make it impossible to...

This paper studies the issue of designing an optimal organizational form: design for sub-units' task allocation, decision-making structure, and incentive schemes for organizational members. Depending on the way tasks are allocated between the sub-units, and whether decision-making is centralized...

We examine a situation where efforts on different tasks positively affect production but are not separately verifiable and where the manager (principal) and the worker (agent) have different ideas about how production should be carried out: agents prefer a less efficient way of production. We...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insurance and a "good" allocation of effort across various tasks is often identified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision, signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity (congruity,...