We consider implementation issues regarding two mechanisms that have been used to increase voter turnout in elections: fines and lotteries. We focus on the amount of the fine or lottery prize needed to achieve full participation. We then propose a combined, self-financing mechanism by which the...

The paper explores organizations designed to influence a group to choose specific alternatives from a set of possible choices. The perspective is that of an administrator that has personal objectives not shared by the group and can dictate organization but not group choice. The design works...

Watson (2007) proposes non-forcing contracts as a way to show the limitations of the mechanism design program with ex-post renegotia- tion (Maskin and Moore (1999)). If one takes a partial implementation approach, as Watson does, we show that non-forcing contracts do not con- stitute an...

We analyze a class of proportional cake-cutting algorithms that use a minimal number of cuts (n-1 if there are n players) to divide a cake that the players value along one dimension. While these algorithms may not produce an envy-free or efficient allocation--as these terms are used in the...

This is an Invited paper for the World Congress of the Econometric Society held in Seattle in August 2000. We discuss the strong connections between auction theory and "standard" economic theory, and argue that auction-theoretic tools and intuitions can provide useful arguments and insights in a...

We study the formation of coalitions that provide public goods to members. Individuals are linked on a tree graph and those with similar preferences are connected on the tree. We present a solution that selects allocations belonging to the coalition structure core and that are also envy-free.

This paper reports an experiment involving two mechanisms that allocate a single unit of an indivisible private good among two players, at no cost to either of them. Both mechanisms, proposed by Moore (1992) and Perry and Reny (1999), are compared in terms of their relative performance to assign...

We study contracting and costly renegotiation in settings of complete, but unverifiable information, using the mechanism-design approach. We show how renegotiation activity is best modeled in the fundamentals of the mechanism-design framework, so that noncontractibility of renegotiation amounts...

This paper develops a payoff equivalence theorem for mechanisms with ambiguity averse participants with preferences of the Maxmin Expected Utility (MEU) form (Gilboa and Schmeidler, 1989). We use our payoff equivalence result to explicitly characterize the revenue maximizing private value...