We study a class of representation mechanisms, based on reports made by a random subset of agents, called representatives, in a collective choice problem with quasi-linear utilities. We do not assume the existence of a common prior probability describing the distribution of preference types. In...

Public choice theory takes citizens as rationally ignorant about political issues, because the costs of being informed greatly exceed the utility individuals derive from it. The costs of information (supply side) as well as the utility of information (demand side), however, can vary...

Public choice theory takes citizens as rationally ignorant about political issues, because the costs of being informed greatly exceed the utility individuals derive from it. The costs of information (supply side) as well as the utility of information (demand side), however, can vary...

This paper is aimed at assesssing the empirical relevance of the new theory of regulation inspired by the theory of incentives. It contributes to the econometrics of asymmetric information models by using the principal-agent framework for studying the regulatory schemes used in French urban...

Jackson and Sonnenschein (2006) show that by linking collective decisions the incentive costs can become negligible and, at the limit, ex-ante efficiency can be achieved. In a voting situation this implies that the agents` intensity of preferences can be taken into account even in the absence of...

Game-theoretic models of marketing channels typically rely on simplifying assumptions that, from a behavioral perspective, often appear naïve. However, behavioral researchers have produced such an abundance of behavioral regularities that they are impossible to incorporate into game-theoretic...

The goal of this paper is to draw some lessons for economic theory from research in psychology, social psychology and, more briefly, in biology, which purports to explain the formation of social preferences. We elicit the basic mechanisms whereby a variety of social preferences are determined in...

The paper studies information processing imperfections in a fully rational decision-making network. It is shown that imperfect information transmission and imperfect information acquisition in a multi-stage selection game yield information overload. The paper analyses the mechanisms responsible...

Neeman (2004) and Heifetz and Neeman (2006) have shown that, in auctions with incomplete information about payoffs, full surplus extraction is only possible if agents’ beliefs about other agents are fully informative about their own payoff parameters. They argue that the set of...

Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983) prove that if one seller and one buyer have independent private valuations for an indivisible object then no individually rational and incentive compatible trading mechanism can guarantee ex post efficiency when gains from trade are uncertain. Makowski and...