We study the design of self-enforcing mechanisms that rely on neither a trusted third party (e.g., court, trusted mechanism designer) nor a long-term relationship. Instead, we use a smart contract written on blockchains as a commitment device. We design the digital court, a smart contract that...

In many random assignment problems, the central planner has their own policy objective, such as matching size and minimum quota fulfillment. A number of practically important policy objectives are not aligned with agents' preferences and known to be incompatible with strategy-proofness. This...

The design of the Bitcoin difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) is vulnerable as it dismisses miners' responses to policy changes. We develop an economic model of the Proof-of-Work blockchain system. Our model allows miners to pause operation when it is not profitable. Hence, the supply of...

Mining application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) is an essential facility for mining in Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchain systems. This paper regards ASIC as a financial asset and proposes a theoretical estimate of the pricing of ASIC. We show that the payouts from ASIC can be replicated...

The size of a matching is defined as the expected number of agents who are matched to some objects. It is an important design objective in many applications, including refugee resettlement, daycare assignment, and mass vaccination campaigns. This paper studies the matching size achieved by...

We study full surplus extraction and implementation in dynamic environments. We exploit intertemporal correlations of agents' types to construct within-period ex post incentive compatible mechanisms. First, we formulate one-shot environments, in which a single agent has a hidden type and the...

We study the size of matchings (expected number of agents matched to some objects) generated by random mechanisms in the assignment problem. We show that no mechanism that satisfies two weak axioms, weak truncation robustness and weak regularity, achieves an approximation ratio better than 1 -...

In many random assignment problems, the central planner has their own policy objective, such as matching size and minimum quota fulfillment. A number of practically important policy objectives are not aligned with agents’ preferences and known to be incompatible with strategy-proofness. This...