We analyze how to optimally engage in social distancing (SD) in order to minimize the spread of an infectious disease. We identify conditions under which the optimal policy is single-peaked, i.e., first engages in increasingly more social distancing and subsequently decreases its intensity. We...

A key part of decentralized consensus protocols is a procedure for random selection, which is the source of the majority of miners cost and wasteful energy consumption in Bitcoin. We provide a simple economic model for random selection mechanism and show that any PoW protocol with natural...

Timing decisions are common: when to file your taxes, finish a referee report, or complete a task at work. We ask whether time preferences can be inferred when only task completion is observed. To answer this question, we analyze the following model: each period a decision maker faces the choice...

Bitcoin's main innovation lies in allowing a decentralized system that relies on anonymous, profit driven miners who can freely join the system. We formalize these properties in three axioms: anonymity of miners, no incentives for miners to consolidate, and no incentive to assuming multiple...

We characterize the set of extreme points of monotone functions that are either majorized by a given function f or themselves majorize f. Any feasible element in a majorization set can be expressed as an integral with respect to a measure supported on the extreme points of that set. We show that...

We derive the revenue maximizing allocation of m units among n symmetric agents who have unit demand, and who take costly actions that influence their values before participating in the mechanism. The allocation problem with costly actions can be represented by a reduced form model where agents...

We derive the revenue maximizing mechanism for a risk-neutral seller whofaces Yaari's [1987] dual risk-averse bidders. The optimal mechanism offers "full-insurance" in the sense that each agent's utility is independent of other agents'reports. The seller excludes less types than under risk...

We study identification of time inconsistency when an agent at time 0 makes an advance commitment, and later at time 1 can revise their choice after possibly receiving additional information. Roughly speaking, we prove that the only data that reject time-consistent expected utility maximization...