We consider a (pure) public goods provision problem with voluntary participation in a quasi-linear economy. We propose a new hybrid solution concept, the free-riding-proof core (FRP-Core), which endogenously determines a contribution group, public goods provision level, and how to share the...

In a matching problem between students and schools, a mechanism is said to be robustly stable if it is stable, strategy-proof, and immune to a combined manipulation, where a student first misreports her preferences and then blocks the matching that is produced by the mechanism. We find that even...

We develop observable restrictions of well-known theories of bargaining over money. We suppose that we observe a finite data set of bargaining outcomes, including data on allocations and disagreement points, but no information on utility functions. We ask when a given theory could generate the...

We study collective choice via an endogenous agenda setting process. At each stage, a status quo is implemented unless it is replaced by a majority (winning coalition) with a new status quo outcome. The process continues until the prevailing status quo is no longer challenged. We impose a...

This paper studies the problem of assigning a set of indivisible objects to a set of agents when monetary transfers are not allowed and agents reveal only ordinal preferences, but random assignments are possible. We offer two characterizations of the probabilistic serial mechanism, which assigns...

A common real-life problem is to fairly allocate a number of indivisible objects and a fixed amount of money among a group of agents. Fairness requires that each agent weakly prefers his consumption bundle to any other agent's bundle. In this context, fairness is incompatible with budget-balance...

A new mechanism was introduced in New York City and Boston to assign students to public schools. This mechanism was advocated for its superior fairness property, besides others. We introduce a new framework for school-choice problems and two notions of fairness in lottery design based on ex-ante...

In the present work, agreement on allocation of payments from multiple issues requires unanimous consent of all parties involved. The agents are assumed to know the aggregate payoffs but do not know their decomposition by issues. This framework applies to many real-world problems, such as the...

In the study of farsighted coalitional behavior, a central role is played by the von Neumann-Morgenstern (1944) stable set and its modification that incorporates farsightedness. Such a modification was first proposed by Harsanyi (1974) and was recently reformulated by Ray and Vohra (2015). The...

We investigate a normative theory of incomplete preferences in the context of preliminary screening procedures. We introduce a theory of ranking in the presence of objectively incomparable marginal contributions (apples and oranges). Our theory recommends benchmarking, a method under which an...