In this paper we develop a differentiable approach to deal with incentives in a, possibly small, subset of a general domain of preferences in economies with one public and one private good. We show that, for two agents, there is no social rule which is efficient, nondictatorial and...

We analyze how a contest organizer chooses optimally the winner when the contestants’ efforts are already exerted and commitment to the use of a given contest success function is not possible. We define the notion of rationalizability in mixed-strategies to capture such a situation. Our...

The theory of mechanism design and implementation abounds with clever mechanisms whose equilibrium outcomes are optimal according to some social choice rule. However, the cleverness of these mechanisms relies on intricate systems of rewards and punishments off-the-equilibrium path. Generally, it...