It is well known that ex post efficient mechanisms for the provision of indivisible public goods are not interim individually rational. However, the corresponding literature assumes that agents who veto a mechanism can enforce a situation in which the public good is never provided. This paper...

A contract auction establishes a contract between a center and one of the bidders. As contracts may describe many terms, preferences over contracts typically display indifferences. The Qualitative Vickrey Auction (QVA) selects the best contract for the winner that is at least as good for the...

We study the problem of finding the profit-maximizing mechanism for a monopolistic provider of a single, non-excludable public good. Our model covers the most general setting, namely, we allow for correlation in the signal distribution as well as for informational externalities in the...

We consider the problem of assigning agents to slots on a line, where only one agent can be served at a slot and each agent prefers to be served as close as possible to his target. Our focus is on aggregate gap minimizing methods, i.e., those that minimize the total gap between targets and...

This paper investigates the welfare effects of affirmative action policies in school choice. We show that affirmative action policies can have perverse consequences. Specifically, we demonstrate that there are market situations in which affirmative action policies inevitably hurt every minority...

Recent work has highlighted welfare gains from the use of the Boston mechanism over deferred acceptance (DA) in school choice problems, in particular finding that when cardinal utility is taken into account, Boston interim Pareto dominates DA in certain incomplete information environments with...

We compare competing college admission matching mechanisms that differ in preference submission timing (pre-exam, post-exam but pre-score, or post-score) and in matching procedure (Boston (BOS) and serial dictatorship (SD) matching). Pre-exam submission asks students to submit college...

The lack of price guidance towards efficiency relevant packages in ascending combinatorial clock auctions (ACCA) can lead to a low-efficiency allocation of goods. We propose a descending price combinatorial clock auction (DCCA) with a newly devised pricing strategy to improve on this problem....

Donations in-kind can be a mixed blessing for charities, who are often more adept at solicitation than resale. Many organizations rely on raffles to turn donations into cash, but auctions are also common. Theory predicts that all-pay mechanisms should produce more revenue than winner-pay...

We propose the minimum approval mechanism (MAM) for a standard linear public good environment with two players. Players simultaneously and privately choose their contributions to the public good in the first stage. In the second stage, they simultaneously decide whether to approve the otherʼs...