We describe a simple 2-stage mechanism whereby for two bargainers, a Buyer and a Seller, it is a weakly dominant strategy to report their reservation prices in the 1st stage. If the Buyer reports a higher price than the Seller, then the referee announces that there is the possibility for trade,...

The endowment and attachment effect are empirically well-documented in bilateral trade situations. Yet, the theoretical literature has so far failed to formally identify these effects. We ftll this gap by introducing expectations-based loss aversion, which can explain both effects, into the...

Ever since Sen crystallized the logical conflict between the welfaristic value of the Pareto principle and the nonwelfaristic value of individual libertarian rights into what he christened the impossibility of a Paretian liberal , there have been many attempts in social choice theory to...

We propose three mechanisms to reach a compromise between two opposite parties that must choose one out of a set of candidates and operate under full information. All three mechanisms weakly implement the Unanimity Compromise Set. They all rely on the use of some Rule of k Names, whereby one of...

We develop a dynamic model in which a group collectively bargains with an external party. At each date the group makes an offer to the external party (the 'agent') in exchange for a concession. Group members hold heterogeneous preferences over agreements and are uncertain about the agent's...

We study intermediaries who seek to maximize gains from trade in bilateral negotiations. Intermediaries are players: they cannot commit to act against their objective function and deny, in some cases, trade they believe to be beneficial. This impairs their ability to assist the parties relative...

Goods and services---public housing, medical appointments, schools---are often allocated to individuals who rank them similarly but differ in their preference intensities. We characterize optimal allocation rules when individual preferences are known and when they are not. Several insights...

Recent healthcare reforms have sought to increase efficiency by introducing managed care (MC) while respecting consumer preferences by admitting choice between MC and conventional care. This article proposes an institutional change designed to let German consumers choose between the two settings...

In this article we combine Debreu's (1952) social system with Hurwicz's (1994, 2008) ideas of embedding a "desired" game form into a "natural" game form that includes all feasible behavior, even if it is "illegal" according to the desired form. For the resulting socio-legal system we extend...

We consider the problem where agents bargain over their shares of a perfectly divisible commodity. The aim of this paper is to identify the class of bargaining solutions induced by dominant strategy implementable allocation rules. To this end, we characterize the class of dominant strategy...