We study mechanisms for environments in which only some of the agents are directly connected to a mechanism designer and the other agents can participate in a mechanism only through the connected agents' referrals. In such environments, the mechanism designer and agents may have different...

Why do women hit the glass ceiling? Women are hired, but then fail to rise through the ranks. We propose a novel explanation for this pattern, namely preference- and belief-free discrimination. In our setting, an employer can increase effort by inducing differential value distributions for a...

Global warming caused by accumulation of emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is a public bad, addressing which requires collective action by all the countries of the world. Under the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), most countries have negotiated the Kyoto Protocol for GHG...

A model of group decision-making is studied, in which one of two alternatives must be chosen. While group members differ in their valuations of the alternatives, everybody prefers some alternative to disagreement. Our model is distinguished by three features: private information regarding...

Rotation programs are widely used in societies. Some examples are job rotations, rotation schemes in the management of common-pool resources, and rotation procedures in fair division problems. We study rotation programs via the implementation of Pareto efficient social choice rules under...

This paper studies how the investment in adaptation can influence the participation in an international environmental agreement (IEA) when countries decide in adaptation before they choose their levels of emissions. Two types of agreements are studied, a complete agreement for which countries...

Many environmental-policy problems are characterized by complexity and uncertainty. Government's choice concerning these policies commonly relies on information provided by a bureaucracy. Environmental bureaucrats often have a political motivation of their own, so they might be tempted to...

The paper addresses the mechanism design problem of eliciting truthful information from a committee of informed experts who collude in their information disclosure strategies. It is shown that under fairly general conditions full information disclosure is possible if and only if the induced...

The literature on public goods has shown that efficient outcomes are impossible if participation constraints have to be respected. This paper addresses the question whether they should be imposed. It asks under what conditions efficiency considerations justify that individuals are forced to pay...