We test whether deviations from Nash equilibrium in rent-seeking contests can be explained by the slow convergence of payoff-based learning. We identify and eliminate two sources of noise that slow down learning. The first source of noise is present because each action is evaluated against a...

This paper considers the problem of allocating an amount of a perfectly divisible resource among agents. We are interested in rules eliminating the possibility that an agent can compensate another to misrepresent her preferences, making both agents strictly better off. Such rules are said to be...

Often preferences are such that any sensible goal must admit a tie between all alternatives. The standard formulation in mechanism design stipulates that in this case all alternatives must be equilibrium outcomes of the decision making mechanism. However, as far as the idea of an equilibrium is...

Consider a society with a finite number of sectors (social issues or commodities). In a partial equilibrium (PE) mechanism a sector authority (SA) aims to elicit agents' preference rankings for outcomes at hand, presuming separability of preferences, while such presumption is false in general...

In this paper we examine the relation between strategy-proofness and unanimity in a domain of private good economies with single-peaked preferences. We prove that, under a mild condition, a social choice function satisfies strategy-proofness if and only if it is unanimous. As implication, we...

Can mechanism design save democracy? We propose a simple design that offers a chance: individuals pay for as many votes as they wish using a number of "voice credits" quadratic in the votes they buy. Only quadratic cost induces marginal costs linear in votes purchased and thus welfare optimality...

This paper studies the possibility of secure implementation (Saijo, T., T. Sjöström, and T. Yamato (2007) "Secure Implementation," Theoretical Economics 2, pp. 203-229) in divisible and non-excludable public good economies with quasi-linear utility functions. Although Saijo, Sjöström, and...

The paper proposes necessary and sufficient conditions for the natural implementation of (efficient) social choice correspondences (SCCs) in pure finite exchange economies when some of the agents are partially honest. A partially honest agent is an agent who strictly prefers to tell the truth...

An individual may display an honesty standard which allows her to lie a little without that being harmful to her self view as an honest person. On this basis, the paper considers a society with a finite number of individuals involving partially-honest individuals and in which every individual...

We characterize the sharing rule that achieves efficiency in a contribution mechanism when agents are heterogeneous. This rule is not the one that was found by Sen when agents are identical. We also show that for a large class of sharing rules if Nash equilibrium yields efficient allocations,...