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...

In many markets, sellers advertise their good with an asking price. This is a price at which the seller is willing to take his good off the market and trade immediately, though it is understood that a buyer can submit an offer below the asking price and that this offer may be accepted if the...

I provide a brief introduction to the early literatures on Matching, Auctions, and Market Design.The design of matching markets and auctions has brought economic theory and practice together. Indeed, this is an area where microeconomic theory has had its largest direct impact. This is in part...

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 investigate menu mechanisms: dynamic mechanisms where at each history, an agent selects from a menu of his possible assignments. We consider both ex-post implementation and full implementation, for both subgame perfection and a strengthening of dominance that covers off-path histories, and...

Mechanisms used to derive optimal allocations are generally designed under the premise that agents fully know their preferences. It is often impossible to duplicate these optimal allocations when agents imperfectly observe object characteristics. I present a crowdsourcing mechanism to...

We introduce a general class of simplicity standards that vary the foresight abilities required of agents in extensive-form games. Rather than planning for the entire future of a game, agents are presumed to be able to plan only for those histories they view as simple from their current...

We introduce a general class of simplicity standards that vary the foresight abilities required of agents in extensive-form games. Rather than planning for the entire future of a game, agents are presumed to be able to plan only for those histories they view as simple from their current...

I introduce a stability notion, dynamic stability, for two-sided dynamic matching markets where (i) matching opportunities arrive over time, (ii) matching is one-to-one, and (iii) matching is irreversible. The definition addresses two conceptual issues. First, since not all agents are available...

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...