Many institutions use matching algorithms to allocate resources to individuals. Examples include the assignment of doctors, students and military cadets to hospitals, schools and branches, respectively. Oftentimes, agents' ordinal preferences are highly correlated, motivating the use of...

A principal distributes an indivisible good to budget-constrained agents when both valuation and budget are agents' private information. The principal can verify an agent's budget at a cost. The welfare-maximizing mechanism can be implemented via a two-stage scheme. First, agents report their...

Various markets ban or heavily restrict monetary transfers. This is often motivated by moral concerns. However, it appears to be disputable whether the observed restrictions on transfers are the appropriate market design answer to these concerns. Instead of exogenously restricting transfers on a...

A principal wishes to distribute an indivisible good to a population of budget-constrained agents. Both valuation and budget are an agent's private information. The principal can inspect an agent's budget through a costly verification process and punish an agent who makes a false statement. I...

There are several locations, each of which is endowed with a resource that is specific to that location. Examples include coastal fisheries, oil fields, etc. Each agent will go to a single location and harvest some of the resource there. Several agents may go to each location. We assign...

Many scarce public resources are allocated at below-market-clearing prices, and sometimes for free. Such "non-market" mechanisms necessarily sacrifice some surplus, yet they can potentially improve equity. In this paper, we develop a model of mechanism design with redistributive concerns. Agents...

We study optimal mechanisms for a utilitarian designer who seeks to assign multiple units of an indivisible good to a group of agents with unit demand. The agents have heterogeneous marginal utilities of money, which implies that utility is not perfectly transferable between them. Heterogeneous...

Can mechanism design save democracy? We propose a simple design that offers a chance: individuals pay for as many votes as they wish using a number of "voice credits" quadratic in the votes they buy. Only quadratic cost induces marginal costs linear in votes purchased and thus welfare optimality...

A principal distributes an indivisible good to budget‐constrained agents when both valuation and budget are agents' private information. The principal can verify an agent's budget at a cost. The welfare‐maximizing mechanism can be implemented via a two‐stage scheme. First, agents report...

We conducted laboratory experiments for the multi-unit Vickrey auction with and without advice to subjects on strategy-proofness. The rate of truth-telling among the subjects without advice was 20%, whereas the rate increased to 47% among those who received advice. By conducting similar...