Often an organization or government must allocate goods without collecting payment in return. This may pose a difficult problem either when agents receiving those goods have private information in regards to their values or needs or when discriminating among agents using known differences is not...

This paper reports on the design of a novel two-stage mechanism, based on strictly proper scoring rules, that motivates selfish rational agents to make a costly probabilistic estimate or forecast of a specified precision and report it truthfully to a centre. Our mechanism is applied in a setting...

Using contests to generate innovation has and is widely used. Such contests often involve offering a prize that depends upon the accomplishment (effort). Using an all-pay auction as a model of a contest, we determine the optimal reward for inducing innovation. In a symmetric environment, we find...

In supply chain management, information about the downstream party's willingness to pay (wtp) for a service or a good sold by an upstream party may not be known to the latter. The seller has to make an educated guess for the price at which to offer a good or service. If the buyer refuses to buy,...

This paper studies the cost requirement for two-agent collusion-proof mechanism design. Unlike the existing results for general environments with three or more agents, it is shown that collusive behavior cannot be prevented freely in two-agent nonlinear pricing environments with correlated...

In this paper we summarize the theoretical arguments of Carson and Groves, et al., and assemble early empirical evidence that comports with this theoretical framework. In doing so, we argue that redefining criterion validity in terms of consequentiality offers the potential for a fundamental...