A contract auction establishes a contract between a center and one of the bidders. As contracts may describe many terms, preferences over contracts typically display indifferences. The Qualitative Vickrey Auction (QVA) selects the best contract for the winner that is at least as good for the...

The lack of price guidance towards efficiency relevant packages in ascending combinatorial clock auctions (ACCA) can lead to a low-efficiency allocation of goods. We propose a descending price combinatorial clock auction (DCCA) with a newly devised pricing strategy to improve on this problem....

In the presence of cost uncertainty, limited liability introduces the possibility of default in procurement. If financial soundness is not perfectly observable, then financially weaker contractors are selected with higher probability in any incentive compatible mechanism. Informational rents are...

It is well known that ex post efficient mechanisms for the provision of indivisible public goods are not interim individually rational. However, the corresponding literature assumes that agents who veto a mechanism can enforce a situation in which the public good is never provided. This paper...

We consider the problem of assigning agents to slots on a line, where only one agent can be served at a slot and each agent prefers to be served as close as possible to his target. Our focus is on aggregate gap minimizing methods, i.e., those that minimize the total gap between targets and...

This paper investigates the welfare effects of affirmative action policies in school choice. We show that affirmative action policies can have perverse consequences. Specifically, we demonstrate that there are market situations in which affirmative action policies inevitably hurt every minority...

Recent work has highlighted welfare gains from the use of the Boston mechanism over deferred acceptance (DA) in school choice problems, in particular finding that when cardinal utility is taken into account, Boston interim Pareto dominates DA in certain incomplete information environments with...

We compare competing college admission matching mechanisms that differ in preference submission timing (pre-exam, post-exam but pre-score, or post-score) and in matching procedure (Boston (BOS) and serial dictatorship (SD) matching). Pre-exam submission asks students to submit college...

Donations in-kind can be a mixed blessing for charities, who are often more adept at solicitation than resale. Many organizations rely on raffles to turn donations into cash, but auctions are also common. Theory predicts that all-pay mechanisms should produce more revenue than winner-pay...

We study all-pay auctions with multiple prizes. The players have the same value for all the certain prizes except for one uncertain prize for which each player has a private value. We characterize the equilibrium strategy and show that, independent of the ranking of the uncertain prize, if the...