How can we maximize the common good? This is a central organizing question of public policy design, across political parties and ideologies. The answer typically involves the provisioning of public goods such as fresh air, national defense, and knowledge. Public goods are costly to produce but...

A profit-maximizing auctioneer can provide a public good to at most one of a number of groups of agents. The groups may have non-empty intersections. Each group member has a private value for the good being provided to each group, which is not commonly known. We investigate an auction mechanism...

We propose a novel proportional cost-sharing mechanism for funding public goods with interdependent values: the agents simultaneously submit bids, which are non-negative numbers; the expenditure on the public good is an increasing and concave function of the sum of the bids; and each agent is...

We study mechanism design problems in quasi-linear environments where the envelope theorem and revenue equivalence principle fail due to non-convex and non-differentiable valuations. We obtain a characterization of incentive compatibility based on the Mirrlees representation of the indirect...

What makes people willing to pay costs to help others, and to punish others’ selfishness? Why does the extent of such behaviors vary markedly across cultures? To shed light on these questions, we explore the role of formal institutions in shaping individuals’ prosociality and punishment. In...

We conduct 3-person bargaining experiments in which the surplus being divided is produced by completing a prior task. Using a Baron-Ferejohn framework, we investigate how differences in contributions to production affect bargaining under different decision rules. Under unanimity rule, all...

We review the theory of fairness as it pertains to concretely specified problems of resource allocations. We present punctual notions designed to evaluate how well individuals, or groups, are treated in relation to one another: no-envy, egalitarian-equivalence, individual and collective lower or...

Often an organization or government must allocate goods without collecting payment in return. This may pose a difficult problem either when agents receiving those goods have private information in regards to their values or needs or when discriminating among agents using known differences is not...

I study a multilateral bargaining game where committee members invest in a common project prior to redistributing the total value of production. The game corresponds to a Baron and Ferejohn (1989) legislative bargaining model preceded by a production stage similar to the voluntary contribution...

Until recently, theorists considering the evolution of human cooperation have paid little attention to institutional punishment, a defining feature of large-scale human societies. Compared to individually-administered punishment, institutional punishment offers a unique potential advantage: the...