Background The dearth of health workers in rural settings in Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR) and other developing countries limits healthcare access and outcomes. In evaluating non-wage financial incentive packages as a potential policy option to attract health workers to rural settings, understanding the expected costs and effects of the various programs ex antecan assist policy-makers ...

This paper takes the first steps towards designing incentive compatible mechanisms for hierarchical decision making problems involving selfish agents. We call these Stackelberg problems. These are problems where the decisions or actions in successive layers of the hierarchy are taken in a sequential way while decisions or actions within each layer are taken in a simultaneous manner. There are m...

We present a generalization of a class of sequential search problems with ordinal ranks, referred to as “secretary” problems, in which applicants are characterized by multiple attributes. We then present a procedure for numerically computing the optimal search policy and test it in two experiments with incentive-compatible payoffs. With payoffs dependent on the absolute ranks of the attributes,...

This paper seeks to address the sharp increase in public debate about privacy issues, particularly on the issues of Internet privacy and the value of personal information. The research questions we are addressing here are – How should an Internet Service Provider (ISP) price its service given that the consumers vary in their valuation for privacy and also vary in terms of the value of their per...

Abstract The typical method of solving for the optimal nonlinear tax schedule relies on deriving incentive-compatible allocations. While this “primal approach” is mathematically rigorous, it lacks intuitive appeal. This paper considers a different that directly system. “dual much closer to actual policy as centers around welfare effects reforms. I show can easily incorporate preference heteroge...

By delegating path control to end-hosts, future Internet architectures offer flexibility for selection. However, a concern arises that the distributed routing decisions by endhosts, in particular load-adaptive routing, can lead oscillations if selection is performed without coordination or accurate load information. Prior research has addressed this problem devising local path-selection policie...