We characterize the outcomes of games when players may make binding offers of strategy contingent side payments before the game is played. This does not always lead to efficient outcomes, despite complete information and costless contracting. The characterizations are illustrated in a series of...

We present the Progressive Second Price auction, a new decentralized mechanism for allocation of variable-size shares of a resource among multiple users. Unlike most mechanisms in the economics litterature, PSP is designed with a very small message space, making it suitable for real-time market...

Population games are stochastic processes which explicitly model Nash's (1950) mass action interpretation of Nash equilibrium. The mass action interpretation envisions a population of players for each position in the game, and that players are randomly matched for play. The hope is that the...

In a framework allowing infinitely many individuals, I prove that coalitionally strategyproof social choice functions satisfy gtops only.h That is, they depend only on which alternative each individual prefers the most, not on which alternative she prefers the second most, the third, . . . , or...

Agent-based computational economics (ACE) is the computational study of economies modeled as evolving systems of autonomous interacting agents. Starting from initial conditions, specified by the modeler, the computational economy evolves over time as its constituent agents repeatedly interact...

For groups that must make several decisions of similar form, we define a simple and general mechanism that is designed to promote social efficiency. The mechanism links the various decisions by forcing agents to budget their representations of preferences so that the frequency of preferences...

This study examines bidder preferences between alternative auction institutions. We seek to experimentally characterize the degree to which bidders prefer an ascending auction to a sealed bid auction. We find very strong ceteris paribus preferences for the ascending institution with bidders...

This is an Invited paper for the World Congress of the Econometric Society held in Seattle in August 2000. We discuss the strong connections between auction theory and "standard" economic theory, and argue that auction-theoretic tools and intuitions can provide useful arguments and insights in a...

We argue that it is natural to study social institutions within the framework of standard game theory (i.e., only by resorting to concepts like players, actions, strategies, information sets, payoff functions, and stochastic processes describing the moves of nature, which constitute a stochastic...

We study the formation of coalitions that provide public goods to members. Individuals are linked on a tree graph and those with similar preferences are connected on the tree. We present a solution that selects allocations belonging to the coalition structure core and that are also envy-free.