How should a society choose between two social alternatives if participation in the decision process is voluntary and costly and monetary transfers are not feasible? Considering symmetric voters with private valuations, we show that it is utilitarian-optimal to use a linear voting rule: votes...

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...

We consider Kyle's market order model of insider trading with multiple informed traders and show: if a linear equilibrium exists for two different numbers of informed traders, asset payoff and noise trading are independent and have finite second moments, then these random variables are normally...

Since the seminal work by Rothschild and Stiglitz on competitive insurance markets under adverse selection the problem of non-existence of equilibrium has puzzled many economists. In this paper we approach this problem from an evo- lutionary point of view. In a dynamic model insurance companies...

In standard auctions with symmetric, independent private value bidders resale creates a role for a speculator—a bidder who is commonly known to have no use value for the good on sale. For second-price and English auctions the efficient value-bidding equilibrium coexists with a continuum...

Majority rules are frequently used to decide whether or not a public good should be provided, but will typically fail to achieve an efficient provision. We provide a worst-case analysis of the majority rule with an optimally chosen majority threshold, assuming that voters have independent...

The existence of a linear equilibrium in Kyle's model of market making with multiple, symmetrically informed strategic traders is implied for any number of strategic traders if the joint distribution of the underlying exogenous random variables is elliptical. The reverse implication has been...

The existence of a linear equilibrium in Kyle's model of market making with multiple, symmetrically informed strategic traders is implied for any number of strategic traders if the joint distribution of the underlying exogenous random variables is elliptical. The reverse implication has been...

Steady state equilibria in heterogeneous agent matching models with search frictions have been shown to exist in Shimer and Smith (2000) under the assumption of a quadratic search technology. We extend their analysis to the commonly investigated linear search technology.