We study how an optimal income tax and an optimal public-goods provision rule respond to preference and productivity shocks. A conventional Mirrleesian treatment is shown to provoke manipulations of the policy mechanism by individuals with similar interests. We therefore extend the Mirrleesian...

We study dominant strategy incentive compatible (DIC) and deterministic mechanisms in a social choice setting with several alternatives. The agents are privately informed about their preferences, and have single-crossing utility functions. Monetary transfers are not feasible. We use an...

We consider the standard mechanism design environment with linear utility but without monetary transfers. We first establish an equivalence between deterministic, dominant strategy incentive compatible mechanisms and generalized median voter schemes. We then use this equivalence to construct the...

Every agent reports his willingness to pay for one unit of a good. A mechanism allocates goods and cost shares to some agents. We characterize the group strategyproof (GSP) mechanisms under two alternative continuity conditions interpreted as tie-breaking rules. With the maximalist rule (MAX) an...

When an individual performs several tasks simultaneously, resources must be allocated to different brain systems to produce energy for neurons to fire. Following the evidence from neuroscience, we model the brain as an organization in which a coordinator allocates limited resources to the brain...

Every agent reports his willingness to pay for one unit of good. A mechanism allocates goods and cost shares to some agents. We characterize the group strategyproof (GSP) mechanisms under two alternative continuity conditions interpreted as tie-breaking rules. With the maximalist rule (MAX) an...

We consider a general economy, where agents have private information about their types. Types can be multi-dimensional and potentially interdependent. We show that, if the realized frequency of types (the exact number of agents for each type) is common knowledge, then a mechanism exists, which...

We present the results of a new laboratory experiment designed to mimic the ways in which credit bureaus will alter microfinance markets. Where loans are taken in groups, bureaus can build reputations for borrowers at the group or the individual level, and the optimal contract is not obvious. In...

We develop a simple theory which formally describes how charities can resolve the information asymmetry problems faced by small donors by working with large donors to generate quality signals. To test the model, we conducted two large-scale natural field experiments. In the first experiment, a...

We develop a simple theory which formally describes how charities can resolve the information asymmetry problems faced by small donors by working with large donors to generate quality signals. To test the model, we conducted two large-scale natural field experiments. In the first experiment, a...