We develop an analysis of voting rules that is robust in the sense that we do not make any assumption regarding voters' knowledge about each other. In dominant strategy voting rules, voters' behavior can be predicted uniquely without making any such assumption. However, on full domains, the only...

We prove a general possibility result for collective decision problems where individual allocations are one-dimensional, preferences are single-peaked (strictly convex), and feasible allocation profiles cover a closed convex set. Special cases include the celebrated median voter theorem (Black...

In a range of settings, private firms manage peer effects by sorting agents into different groups, be they schools, communities, or product categories. This paper considers such a firm, which controls group entry by setting a series of anonymous prices. We show that private provision...

The paper considers a voting model where each voter's type is her preference. The type graph for a voter is a graph whose vertices are the possible types of the voter. Two vertices are connected by an edge in the graph if the associated types are "neighbors." A social choice function is locally...

In the context of a canonical agency model, we study the payoff implications of introducing optimally structured incentives. We do so from the perspective of an analyst who does not know the agent's preferences for responding to incentives, but does know that the principal knows them. We...

We study intermediaries who seek to maximize gains from trade in bilateral negotiations. Intermediaries are players: they cannot commit to act against their objective function and deny, in some cases, trade they believe to be beneficial. This impairs their ability to assist the parties relative...

We study a problem of optimal auction design in the realistic case in which the players can collude both on the way they play in the auction and on their participation decisions. Despite the fact that the principal's opportunities for extracting payments from the agents in such a situation are...

We give a sufficient condition on the type space for revenue equivalence when the set of social alternatives consists of probability distributions over a finite set. Types are identified with real-valued functions that assign valuations to elements of this finite set, and the type space is...

A speaker wishes to persuade a listener to take a certain action. The conditions under which the request is justified, from the listener’s point of view, depend on the state of the world, which is known only to the speaker. Each state is characterized by a set of statements from which the...