A lecture explaining the causes of the 2008-9 world financial crisis in terms of ordinary economic processes. The lecture was delivered at the 39th St. Gallen Symposium, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, 8 May 2009.

We study auctions with additive valuations where agents have a limit on the number of items they may receive. We refer to this setting as capacitated allocation games. We seek truthful and envy free mechanisms that maximize the social welfare. I.e., where agents have no incentive to lie and no...

We quantify the effect of Bayesian ignorance by comparing the social cost obtained in a Bayesian game by agents with local views to the expected social cost of agents having global views. Both benevolent agents, whose goal is to minimize the social cost, and selfish agents, aiming at minimizing...

We consider the problem of locating a facility on a network, represented by a graph. A set of strategic agents have different ideal locations for the facility; the cost of an agent is the distance between its ideal location and the facility. A mechanism maps the locations reported by the agents...

We study envy-free mechanisms for scheduling tasks on unrelated machines (agents) that approximately minimize the makespan. For indivisible tasks, we put forward an envy-free poly-time mechanism that approximates the minimal makespan to within a factor of O(logm), where m is the number of...

A response to criticism of the paper "On the Matter of the Man with Three Wives," Moriah 22 (1999), 98- 107 (see also Rationality Center DP 102, June 1996). The Moriah paper is a non- mathematical account, written in Hebrew for the Rabbinic public, of "Game- Theoretic Analysis of a Bankruptcy...

We propose a simple adaptive procedure for playing strategic games: average testing. In this procedure each player sticks to her current strategy if it yields a payoff that exceeds her average payoff by at least some fixed \epsilon 0; otherwise she chooses a strategy at random. We consider...

This research illustrates the power of reputation, such as that embodied in brand names, demonstrating that names can enhance objective product efficacy. Study participants facing a glaring light were asked to read printed words as accurately and as quickly as they could, receiving compensation...

The traditional premise of criminal law is that criminals who are convicted of similar crimes under similar circumstances ought to be subject to identical sentences. This article provides an efficiency-based rationale for discriminatory sentencing, i.e., establishes circumstances under which...

We consider the classical problem of selecting the best of two treatments in clinical trials with binary response. The target is to find the design that maximizes the power of the relevant test. Many papers use a normal approximation to the power function and claim that Neyman allocation that...