The assessment that the implementation of efficient outcomes by means of decentralized spontaneous solutions is to be expected for private goods, but not for public goods has become part of the conventional wisdom of our discipline. This paper uses a mechanism design approach to clarify under...

Which decision rule should we use to make a binary collective choice? While voting procedures are applied ubiquitously, they are criticized for being inefficient. Using monetary transfers, efficient choices can be made at the cost of a budget imbalance. Is it optimal to do so? And why are...

Governments must usually take policy decisions with an imperfect knowledge of the economic actors' type or the actors' effort level. These issues are addressed within the framework of classic adverse selection or moral hazard models. I discuss in this paper how would the government's and the...

This paper studies optimal auction design when the seller can affect the buyers' valuations through an unobservable ex ante investment. The key insight is that the optimal mechanism may have the seller play a mixed investment strategy so as to create correlation between the otherwise...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a shortlisted set. Items are differentiated by observable quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. Sellers quote prices strategically, inducing a knapsack game. The buyer's problem is to select a subset of maximal...

We analyze the provision of a step-level public good in an experiment. Specifically, we investigate how the order of moves and the introduction of a second step-level affects public-good provision. We find that the sequential-move game improves public-good provision and payoffs. An additional...

We investigate whether peer punishment is an efficient mechanism for enforcing cooperation in an experiment with a long time horizon. Previous evidence suggests that the costs of peer punishment can be outweighed by the benefits of higher cooperation, if (i) there is a sufficiently long time...

We present experimental evidence that illuminates the trade-off between efficiency considerations and social identity concerns in an inter-city multilevel public goods game. In total, 616 inhabitants of Heidelberg and Mannheim take part in an online experiment in which they can allocate an...

Optimal voting rules have to be adjusted to the underlying distribution of preferences. However, in practice there usually is no social planner who can perform this task. This paper shows that the introduction of a stage at which agents may themselves choose voting rules according to which they...