We introduce a general class of simplicity standards that vary the foresight abilities required of agents in extensive-form games. Rather than planning for the entire future of a game, agents are presumed to be able to plan only for those histories they view as simple from their current...

We introduce intention-based social preferences into a Bayesian mechanism design framework. We first show that, under common knowledge of social preferences, any tension between material efficiency, incentive compatibility, and voluntary participation can be resolved. Hence, famous impossibility...

We consider robust virtual implementation, where robustness is the requirement that implementation succeed in all type spaces consistent with a given payoff type space as well as with a given space of first-order beliefs about the other agents’ payoff types. This last bit, which constitutes...

Suppose that the goals of a society can be summarized in a social choice rule, i.e., a mapping from relevant underlying parameters to final outcomes. Typically, the underlying parameters (e.g., individual preferences) are private information to the agents in society. The implementation problem...

Decision makers lacking crucial specialist know-how often consult with better informed but biased experts. In our model the decision maker's choice problem is binary and her preferred option depends on the state of the world unknown to her. The expert observes the state and sends a report to the...

We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of equilibria with only two active players in the all-pay auction with complete information and identity-dependent externalities. This condition shows that the generic equilibrium of the standard all-pay auction is robust to the...

An uncovered bargaining solution is a bargaining solution for which there exists a complete and strict relation (tournament) such that, for each feasible set, the bargaining solution set coincides with the uncovered set of the tournament. We provide a characterization of a class of uncovered...

Transaction costs are omnipresent in markets yet are often omitted in economic models. We show that their presence can fundamentally alter incentives and welfare in markets in which the price equates supply and demand. We categorize transaction costs into two types. Asymptotically...

We study equilibria in second price auctions when bidders are independently and privately informed about both their values and participation costs and their joint distributions across bidders are not necessarily identical. We show that there always exists an equilibrium in this general setting...

We investigate efficiency properties of sealed-bid second-price auctions with costly participation and resale. Each bidder chooses to participate in the auction if her valuation is higher than her optimally chosen participation cutoff. If resale is not allowed and the bidder valuations are drawn...