We introduce a general class of simplicity standards that vary the foresight abilities required of agents in extensive-form games. Rather than planning for the entire future of a game, agents are presumed to be able to plan only for those histories they view as simple from their current...

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 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...

Computer automation has the potential, just starting to be realized, of transforming the design and operation of markets, and the behaviors of agents trading in them. We discuss the possibilities for automating markets, presenting a broad conceptual framework covering resource allocation as well...

Mechanism design, a reverse problem of game theory, is an important branch of economics. Nash implementation is the cornerstone of the theory of mechanism design. The well-known Maskin's theorem describes the sufficient conditions for Nash implementation when the number of agents are at least...

A necessary and sufficient condition for dominant strategy implementability when preferences are quasilinear is that, for any individual i and any choice of the types of the other individuals, all k-cycles in i's allocation graph have nonnegative length for every integer k � 2. Saks and Yu...

This paper establishes a relationship between the observability of common shocks and optimal organizational design under a multiagent moral hazard environment. We show that, with sucient information about common shocks, a cooperative organization can be optimal even if outputs are highly...

We study dominant strategy incentive compatible (DIC) and deterministic mechanisms in a social choice setting with several alternatives. The agents are privately informed about their preferences, and have single-crossing utility functions. Monetary transfers are not feasible. We use an...

We consider the standard mechanism design environment with linear utility but without monetary transfers. We first establish an equivalence between deterministic, dominant strategy incentive compatible mechanisms and generalized median voter schemes. We then use this equivalence to construct the...

A group of actors, individuals or firms, can engage in collectively providing projects which may be costly or generating revenues and which may benefit some and harm others. Based on requirements of procedural fairness, we derive a bidding mechanism determining endogenously who participates in...