The siting of noxious facilities often involves externalities that extend beyond the border of the community selected as a site. Thus, the private information of each community is potentially a vector of costs comprising a cost for each of the possible sites. I characterize the conditions for...

In this paper we study the optimal file-sharing mechanism in a peer-to-peer network with a mechanism design perspective. This mechanism improves upon existing incentive schemes. In particular, we show that peer-approved scheme is never optimal and service-quality scheme is optimal only under...

In mechanism design, Myerson regularity is often too weak for a quantitative analysis of performance. For instance, ratios between revenue and welfare, or sales probabilities may vanish at the boundary of Myerson regularity. This paper therefore explores the quantitative version of Myerson...

McAfee and Reny (1992) have given a necessary and sufficient condition for full surplus extraction in models with a continuum of types. We interpret their condition as significantly stronger version of the requirement of injectiveness of the function mapping abstract types into beliefs and prove...

We study the relation between mechanism design and voting in public-good provision. If incentive mechanisms must satisfy conditions of coalition-proofness and robustness, as well as individual incentive compatibility, the participants' contributions to public-good provision can only depend on...

In a large economy, a first-best provison rule for a public good is robustly implementable with budget balance because no one individual alone can affect the aggregate outcome. First-best outcomes can, however, be blocked by coalitions of agents acting in concert. With a requirement of immunity...

An auction is externality-robust if unilateral deviations from equilibrium leave the other bidders' payoffs unaffected. The equilibrium and its outcome will then persist if certain types of externalities arise between bidders. One example are externalities due to spiteful preferences, which have...

This paper shows that, contrary to what is generally believed, decreasing concavity of the agent's utility function with respect to the screening variable is not sufficient to ensure that stochastic mechanisms are suboptimal. The paper demonstrates, however, that they are suboptimal whenever the...

We consider a general economy, where agents have private information about their types. Types can be multi-dimensional and potentially interdependent. We show that, if the interim distribution of types is common knowledge (the exact number of agents for each type is known), then a mechanism...

An auction is externality-robust if unilateral deviations from equilibrium leave the other bidders' payoffs unaffected. The equilibrium and its outcome will then persist if certain types of externalities arise between bidders. One example are externalities due to spiteful preferences, which have...