This paper justifies the evolution of the college admissions system in China from a mechanism design perspective. The sequential choice algorithm and the parallel choice algorithm used in the context of China's college admissions system are formulated as the well-studied Boston mechanism and the...

We present a survey of the emerging literature on the design of matching markets. We survey the articles on discrete resource allocation problems, their solutions, and their applications in three related domains. The first domain gives the theoretical background regarding the basic models,...

In this paper we study the adjustment of a N-country world economy to an unfavourable common supply shock. We show that world-wide monetary policy coordination is essential to achieve an optimal adjustment to the common shock, but that its actual implementation requires careful design to ensure...

We uncover a new necessary condition for implementation in iteratively undominated strategies by mechanisms that satisfy the “best element property” where for each agent, there exists a strategy profile that gives him the highest payoff in the mechanism. This class includes finite and...

We study a mechanism design problem where arbitrary restrictions are placed on the sets of first-order beliefs of agents. Calling these restrictions Δ, we use Δ-rationalizability (Battigalli and Siniscalchi, 2003, [5]) as our solution concept, and require that a mechanism virtually implement a...

We consider collective choice from two alternatives. Ex-ante, each agent is uncertain about which alternative she prefers, and may be uncertain about the intensity of her preferences. An environment is given by a probability distribution over utility vectors that is symmetric across agents and...

A group of actors, individuals or firms, can engage in collectively providing projects which may be costly or generating revenues and which may benefit some and harm others. Based on requirements of procedural fairness, we derive a bidding mechanism determining endogenously who participates in...

This paper measures the causal effect of coalition vs. single-party governments on fiscal policies using a data set of 396 municipalities in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia in the time period 1985-2004. Using a regression discontinuity design to take the endogeneity of the type of...