We evaluate the goal of maximizing the number of individually rational assignments. We show that it implies incentive, fairness, and implementation impossibilities. Despite that, we present two classes of mechanisms that maximize assignments. The first are Pareto efficient, and undominated - in...

We introduce a general class of simplicity standards that vary the foresight abilities required of agents in extensive-form games. Rather than planning for the entire future of a game, agents are presumed to be able to plan only for those histories they view as simple from their current...

In many markets, sellers advertise their good with an asking price. This is a price at which the seller is willing to take his good off the market and trade immediately, though it is understood that a buyer can submit an offer below the asking price and that this offer may be accepted if the...

I provide a brief introduction to the early literatures on Matching, Auctions, and Market Design.The design of matching markets and auctions has brought economic theory and practice together. Indeed, this is an area where microeconomic theory has had its largest direct impact. This is in part...

Many scarce public resources are allocated at below-market-clearing prices, and sometimes for free. Such "non-market" mechanisms necessarily sacrifice some surplus, yet they can potentially improve equity. In this paper, we develop a model of mechanism design with redistributive concerns. Agents...

We investigate menu mechanisms: dynamic mechanisms where at each history, an agent selects from a menu of his possible assignments. We consider both ex-post implementation and full implementation, for both subgame perfection and a strengthening of dominance that covers off-path histories, and...

Mechanisms used to derive optimal allocations are generally designed under the premise that agents fully know their preferences. It is often impossible to duplicate these optimal allocations when agents imperfectly observe object characteristics. I present a crowdsourcing mechanism to...

We introduce a general class of simplicity standards that vary the foresight abilities required of agents in extensive-form games. Rather than planning for the entire future of a game, agents are presumed to be able to plan only for those histories they view as simple from their current...

Goods and services---public housing, medical appointments, schools---are often allocated to individuals who rank them similarly but differ in their preference intensities. We characterize optimal allocation rules when individual preferences are known and when they are not. Several insights...

In many centralized matching markets, agents' property rights over objects are derived from a coarse transformation of an underlying score. Prominent examples include the distance-based system employed by Boston Public Schools, where students who lived within a certain radius of each school were...