We put forward new benchmarks and solution concepts for Adversarial Mechanism Design, as defined by [MV07.a], and we exemplify them in the case of truly combinatorial auctions.We benchmark the combined performance (the sum of the auction's efficiency and revenue) of a truly combinatorial auction...

We show that collusion and wrong beliefs may cause a dramatic efficiency loss in the Vickrey mechanism for auctioning a single good in limited supply. We thus put forward a new mechanism guaranteeing efficiency in a very adversarial collusion model, where the players can partition themselves...

We study mechanism design in non-Bayesian settings of incomplete information, when the designer has no information about the players, and the players have arbitrary, heterogeneous, first-order, and possibilistic beliefs about their opponents' payoff types.

Privacy and trust affect our strategic thinking, yet have not been precisely modeled in mechanism design. In settings of incomplete information, traditional implementations of a normal-form mechanism--by disregarding the players' privacy, or assuming trust in a mediator--may fail to reach the...

Department: Graduate School of Business.

At the end of 2009, countries in the Eurozone began to experience a sudden divergence of bond yields as the perceived prospect of sovereign default risk increased. This paper examines the potential spillovers between the liquidity of the sovereign credit default swap (CDS) market and the...

This study explores two important aspects of entrepreneurship -- liquidity constraints and serial entrepreneurs, with an additional analysis of occupational choice among wage workers. In the first essay, I revisit the question of whether entrepreneurs face liquidity constraints in business...

Superior investment returns are often attributed to superior information processing capabilities of investors. Inferior investment returns are often attributed to inferior cognitive capabilities of investors. While investment return can be quantified, there does not exist a quantitative measure...