An auction is used to sell a resource that is then developed by the winning buyer to generate a profit. Two forms of payment are considered: (i) charging the winning buyer a one-time payment; (ii) charging an initial payment followed by a profit sharing contract (PSC) that divides the realized...

Given an objective for a group of three or more agents that satisfies monotonicity and no veto power, Maskin (1977) proposes a two-step procedure for constructing a game that implements the objective in Nash equilibrium. The first step specifies the strategy set of the game and three properties...

We consider a market for indivisible items with m buyers and m sellers. Traders privately know their values/costs, which are statistically dependent. Two mechanisms are considered. The buyer's bid double auction collects bids and asks from traders and determines the allocation by selecting a...

Strategic behavior in a finite market can cause inefficiency in the allocation, and market mechanisms differ in how successfully they limit this inefficiency. A method for ranking algorithms in computer science is adapted here to rank market mechanisms according to how quickly inefficiency...

A mechanism that is both efficient and incentive compatible in the Bayesian-Nash sense is shown to be payoff-equilvalent to a Groves mechanism at the point in time when each agent has just acquired his private information. This equilvalence result simplifies the question of whether or not an...

Consider an exchange economy with n traders and k goods. Suppose that there exists C2 mappings p(middot) and x (middot) that specify for each initial endowment w of the k goods to the n traders a price vector p(w) and a vector of net trades x(w) that define a competitive equilibrium. Three...

In a Bayesian model of group decision-making, dependence among the agents' types has been shown to have a beneficial effect on the design of incentive compatible mechanisms that achieve the efficient choice associated with complete information. This effect is shown here to depend as much upon...