This paper presents a mechanism inducing costly research and innovation in the absence of intellectual property rights. The mechanism relies on forward contracting between the provider of the innovation and firms or individuals that benefit from the pecuniary effects of the innovation, rather...

There has been an extensive research literature on auctions, but recent developments in technology have resulted in new interest in auction mechanisms as a practical way of allocating resources. This paper presents a new double-auction mechanism to handle resource allocation for public goods...

Implementing a project, like a nationwide nuclear waste disposal, which benefits all involved agents but brings major costs only to the host is often problematic. In practice, revelation issues and redistributional concerns are significant obstacles to achieving stable agreements. We address...

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...

The literature on public goods has shown that e?cient 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 e?ciency considerations justify that individuals are forced to pay for...

In a repeated-interaction public goods economy, dynamic behavior may affect the efficiency of various mechanisms thought to be efficient in one-shot games. Inspired by results obtained in previous experiments, the current paper proposes a simple best response model in which players' beliefs are...

This paper provides a limit result for the provision of a public good in a mechanism design framework as the number of agents gets large. A canonical example for a public good that is produced with a direct provision technology is Open Source Software.

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.