What is the best way to reward innovation? While prizes avoid deadweight loss, intellectual property selects high social surplus projects. Optimal innovation policy thus trades off the ex-ante screening benefit and the ex-post distortion. It solves a multidimensional screening problem in the...

Holdout problems prevent decentralized aggregation of complementary goods, but the coercion required to overcome holdout may encourage abuse and violate fairness standards. We propose second-best efficiency, abuse-prevention, and fairness criteria for procedures intended to reduce holdout. Our...

Although mutualisms are common in all ecological communities and have played key roles in the diversification of life, our current understanding of the evolution of cooperation applies mostly to social behavior within a species. A central question is whether mutualisms persist because hosts have...

We propose a simple and practical "raffle" mechanism for allocating a limited supply of heterogeneous goods among unit demand consumers. While the mechanism is inspired by the common "tricky tray" raffle and a housing allocation system in Singapore, it has not been analyzed before, perhaps...

We study the performance of the Quadratic Voting (QV) mechanism proposed by Lalley and Weyl (2016) in finite populations of various sizes using three decreasingly analytic but increasingly precise methods with emphasis on examples calibrated to the 2008 gay marriage referendum in California....

We propose a design for philanthropic or publicly-funded seeding to allow (near) optimal provision of a decentralized, self-organizing ecosystem of public goods. The concept extends ideas from Quadratic Voting to a funding mechanism for endogenous community formation. Citizens make public goods...

We study a voting scheme for multiple alternatives. Our scheme generalizes the two-alternative quadratic voting scheme of Lalley and Weyl. We prove that our generalization results in an outcome where the most-valued alternative wins, and that the vote totals order alternatives from most-to-least...

Large and thus statistically powerful A/B tests are increasingly popular in business and policy to evaluate potential innovations. We study how to optimally use scarce experimental resources to screen innovations. To do so, we propose a new framework for optimal experimentation that we call the...

This online appendix accompanies the paper “Descending Price Optimally Coordinates Search” by the same authors. The main paper is available at 'http://ssrn.com/abstract=2753858' http://ssrn.com/abstract=2753858