This paper considers a hypothetical government-run credit rating agency with a “fixed compensation” scheme. Taking as granted the fact that investors ascribe higher value for highly rated assets, the model attempts to see whether government intervention can lead to a more socially desirable solution. The model features a free rating agent who can either choose to work for the government agency ...

I describe a model of strategic communication within groups in policy-making situations with decentralized policy-making authority. I show that, in a cheap-talk environment, inclusion and exclusion of agents can affect the credibility of signaling between agents and, accordingly, both the quality of individual policy decisions and social welfare. Somewhat surprisingly, the inclusion of agents c...

We discuss the design of efficient scrip systems and develop tools for empirically analyzing them. For those interested in the empirical study of scrip systems, we demonstrate how characteristics of agents in a system can be inferred from the equilibrium distribution of money. From the perspective of a system designer, we examine the effect of the money supply on social welfare and show that so...

A multiagent system may be thought of as an artificial society of autonomous software agents and we can apply concepts borrowed from welfare economics and social choice theory to assess the social welfare of such an agent society. In this paper, we study an abstract negotiation framework where agents can agree on multilateral deals to exchange bundles of indivisible resources. We then analyse h...

There is an old saying that we don’t really understand something if we cannot communicate it to others. In our work with state and local sites pursuing systems integration, we have found this axiom holds true. Proponents of human services reform often believe they know what they are trying to accomplish through systems integration. However, when asked to tell a coherent story about their reform...

Information asymmetry between sellers and buyers often impedes socially desirable trade. This paper presents a new mechanism that mitigates the inefficiencies caused by information asymmetry. It is shown that markets under severe adverse selection can be endogenously segmented and such segmentation improves social welfare. Endogenous segmentation is driven by low-quality sellers’ incentive to a...

A multiagent system may be regarded as an artificial society of autonomous software agents. Welfare economics provides formal models of how the distribution of resources amongst the members of a society affects the well-being of that society as a whole. In multiagent systems research, the concept of social welfare is usually given a utilitarian interpretation, i.e. whatever increases the averag...