We show that Ergin & Sönmez's (2006) results which show that for schools it is a dominant strategy to truthfully rank the students under the Boston mechanism, and that the Nash equilibrium outcomes in undominated strategies of the induced game are stable, rely crucially on two assumptions....

How should a group of people decide to allocate a task that has to be done but is not adequately rewarded? This paper finds an optimal mechanism for the private provision of a public service in an environment without monetary transfers. All members of the group have the same cost of providing...

The implementation problem is the problem of designing a mechanism (game form) such that the equilibrium outcomes satisfy a criterion of social optimality embodied in a social choice rule. If a mechanism has the property that, in each possible state of the world, the set of equilibrium outcomes...

This chapter explores how economists use experimental methods to understand better the behavioral underpinnings of environmental valuation. Economic experiments, in the lab or field, are an attractive tool to address intricate incentive and contextual questions that arise in assessing values...

We argue that when externalities such as pollution are nonexcludable, agents must be compelled to participate in a “mechanism” to ensure a Pareto-efficient outcome. We survey some of the main findings of the mechanism-design (implementation-theory) literature – such as the Nash...

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...