We introduce the groupwise-pivotal referral (GPR) mechanism for auctions where buyers can participate only through referrals. Each buyer's type consists of a valuation and referable buyers. Unlike the second-price auction (SPA), the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism provides referral...

Often an organization or government must allocate goods without collecting payment in return. This may pose a difficult problem either when agents receiving those goods have private information in regards to their values or needs or when discriminating among agents using known differences is not...

How agents assess the (in-)tangible externalities that others might impose on them can strongly influence strategic interaction. This study explores mechanism design for agents whose externality assessments and private payoffs, exclusive of externalities, are all subject to asymmetric...

We study the pricing and tipping behaviour of users of the online service 'Google Answers'. While they set a price for the answer to their question ex ante, they can additionally give a tip to the researcher ex post. We develop a model that is based on reciprocal theories of social preferences...

For an incomplete-information model of public-good provision with interim participation constraints, we show that efficient outcomes can be approximated, with approximately full surplus extraction, when there are many agents and each agent is informationally small. The result holds even if...

This paper studies a model of mechanism design with transfers where agents' preferences need not be quasilinear. In such a model:(1) we characterize dominant strategy incentive compatible mechanisms using a monotonicity property; (2) we establish a revenue uniqueness result: for every dominant...

We propose a novel proportional cost-sharing mechanism for funding public goods with interdependent values: the agents simultaneously submit bids, which are non-negative numbers; the expenditure on the public good is an increasing and concave function of the sum of the bids; and each agent is...

Private provision of public goods often takes place as a war of attrition: individuals wait until someone else volunteers and provides the good. After a certain time period, however, one individual may be randomly selected. If the individuals are uncertain about their cost of provision, but can...

Private provision of public goods often takes place as a war of attrition: individuals wait until someone else volunteers and provides the good. After a certain time period, however, one individual may be randomly selected. If the individuals are uncertain about their cost of provision, but can...