We study mechanisms for environments in which only some of the agents are directly connected to a mechanism designer and the other agents can participate in a mechanism only through the connected agents' referrals. In such environments, the mechanism designer and agents may have different...

This chapter surveys the past applications of game theory to the study of terrorism. By capturing the strategic interplay between terrorists and targeted governments, game theory is an appropriate methodology for investigating terrorism and counterterrorism. Game theory has been used to examine...

Previous research shows that collective action to avoid a catastrophic threshold, such as a climate "tipping point", is unaffected by uncertainty about the impact of crossing the threshold but that collective action collapses if the location of the threshold is uncertain. Theory suggests that...

There is a potential free-rider problem when several siblings consider future provision of care for their elderly parents. Siblings can commit to not providing long- term support by living far away. If location decisions are made by birth order, older siblings may enjoy a first-mover advantage....

The implementation problem is the problem of designing a mechanism (game form) such that the equilibrium outcomes satisfy a criterion of social optimality embodied in a social choice rule. If a mechanism has the property that, in each possible state of the world, the set of equilibrium outcomes...

How should a group of people decide to allocate a task that has to be done but is not adequately rewarded? This paper finds an optimal mechanism for the private provision of a public service in an environment without monetary transfers. All members of the group have the same cost of providing...

The paper considers a voting model where each voter's type is her preference. The type graph for a voter is a graph whose vertices are the possible types of the voter. Two vertices are connected by an edge in the graph if the associated types are "neighbors." A social choice function is locally...

Computer automation has the potential, just starting to be realized, of transforming the design and operation of markets, and the behaviors of agents trading in them. We discuss the possibilities for automating markets, presenting a broad conceptual framework covering resource allocation as well...

We consider mechanism design in contexts in which agents exhibit bounded depth of reasoning (level k ) instead of rational expectations. We use simple direct mechanisms, in which agents report only first-order beliefs. While level 0 agents are assumed to be truth tellers, level k agents...

We introduce intention-based social preferences into a mechanism design framework with independent private values and quasilinear payoffs. For the case where the designer has no information about the intensity of social preferences, we provide conditions under which mechanisms which have been...