I consider two-person bargaining problems in which mechanism is selected at the almost ex ante stage---when there is some positive probability that players may have learned their private types---and the chosen mechanism is implemented at the interim stage. For these problems, I define almost ex...

We analyze the formation of partnerships in social networks. Players need favors at random times and ask their neighbors in the network to form exclusive long-term partnerships that guarantee reciprocal favor exchange. Refusing to provide a favor results in the automatic removal of the...

We study priority-based matching markets with public and private endowments. We show that efficiency-adjusted deferred acceptance (EADA) is justified-envy minimal in the class of efficient mechanisms, while Top trading cycles (TTC) and other popular mechanisms are not. Our findings highlight...

We study the object allocation problem and present two new characterizations of ordinal efficiency in terms of supports of random assignments. Our main characterization provides a link between ex-post and ordinal efficiency

The paper considers an assignment problem with acceptant substitutable priorities, and analyzes efficiency properties of the deferred acceptance rule. As a generalization of Ergin (2002), we come up with the acyclicity condition, and show that the priority structure is acyclical if and only if...

We introduce and analyze an efficiency criterion for probabilistic assignment of objects, when only ordinal preference information is available. This efficiency criterion is based on the following domination relation: a probabilistic assignment dominates another assignment if it is ex-ante...

We identify conditions under which a bargainer makes inefficiently large (small) investments in search for information about the opponent's reservation price. The analysis starts with the observation that a player will invest too much (too little) if the opponent's expected payoff is decreasing...

We study marriage problems where two groups of agents match to each other and probabilistic assignments are possible. When only ordinal preferences are observable, an extensively studied efficiency notion is stochastic dominance efficiency (sd-efficiency). First, we provide a characterization of...

Gale and Sabourian (2006) discuss the existence of inefficient Markov-perfect equilibrium (MPE) in a heterogeneous market. This paper shows that the example they provide cannot be supportedas a MPE. Indeed, with two buyers and two sellers, the dispersion of bargaining positions is not...

Drawbacks of existing procedures are illustrated and a method of efficient fair division is proposed that avoids them. Given additive participants' utilities, each item is priced at the geometric mean (or some other function) of its two highest valuations. The utilities are scaled so that the...