Should an auctioneer start a rising auction from some starting price or set it as a reservation price? Under what circumstances might a bidder find it rational to raise the current offer by a substantial factor instead of making just a small increase above the highest bid? This paper aims to...

Evidence, both anecdotal and scientific, suggests that people treat (or are affected by) products of prestigious sources differently than those of less prestigious or anonymous sources. The "products" which are the focus of the present study are poems, and the "sources" are the poets. We explore...

We consider the problem of finding the mechanism that maximizes the revenue of a seller of multiple objects. This problem turns out to be significantly more complex than the case where there is only a single object (which was solved by Myerson [5]). The analysis is dificult even in the simplest...

We study the space-and-time automaton-complexity of the CYCLE-LENGTH problem. The input is a periodic stream of bits whose cycle length is bounded by a known number n. The output, a number between 1 and n, is the exact cycle length. We also study a related problem, CYCLE-DIVISOR. In the latter...

"Waste not want not" expresses our culture's aversion to waste. "I could have gotten the same thing for less" is a sentiment that can diminish pleasure in a transaction. We study people's willingness to "pay" to avoid this spoiler. In one scenario, participants imagined they were looking for a...

Standard theory assumes that voters' preferences over actions (voting) are induced by their preferences over electoral outcomes (policies, candidates). But voters may also have non-consequentialist (NC) motivations: they may care about how they vote even if it does not a¤ect the outcome. When...

We analyze maximization of revenue in the dynamic and stochastic knapsack problem where a given capacity needs to be allocated by a given deadline to sequentially arriving agents. Each agent is described by a two-dimensional type that reflects his capacity requirement and his willingness to pay...

Scientists try to find out the truth about our world. Judges in a court of law try to find out the truth about the target events in the indictment. What are the similarities, and what are the differences, in the procedures that govern the search for truth in these two systems? In particular, why...

We characterize the incentive compatible, constrained efficient policy ("second-best") in a dynamic matching environment, where impatient, privately informed agents arrive over time, and where the designer gradually learns about the distribution of agents' values. We also derive conditions on...