The impossibility result by Jehiel and Moldovanu says that in a setting with interdependent valuations, any efficient and ex-post incentive compatible mechanism must be a constant mechanism. Mezzetti circumvents this problem by designing a two stage mechanism where the decision of allocation and payment are split over the two stages. This mechanism is elegant, however keeps a major weakness. In...

Dean of the Graduate College iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Xiaolin Li, whose expertise, understanding, and patience, added considerably to my graduate experience. I appreciate his vast knowledge and skill in many areas, and his assistance in writing this thesis. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee, Dr. Subhash Kak and Dr....

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) established under the Kyoto Protocol allows industrialized Annex I countries to offset part of their domestic emissions by investing in emissions-reduction projects in developing non-Annex I countries. We present a novel CDM modeling framework which can be used in computable-general-equilibrium (CGE) models to quantify the sector-specific and macroeconomic ...

Motivated by the desire for high-throughput public databases (i.e., “blockchains”), we design incentive compatible protocols that run “off-chain”, but rely on an existing cryptocurrency to implement a reward and/or punishment mechanism. Our protocols are incentive compatible in the sense that behaving honestly is a weak Nash equilibrium, even in spite of potentially malicious behavior from a sm...

The possibilities for achieving desirable standards of economic performance in a decentralized, incentive compatible manner have recently received widespread research attention. Perhaps the most notable contribution in this area has been the remarkable paper by Groves and Ledyard [7]. They devised a mechanism for allocating resources in economies with public goods which gives agents broad oppor...

A large literature on incentive mechanisms represents incentive constraints by the requirement that truthful reporting be a Bayesian equilibrium. This paper identifies mechanism design problems for which there is no loss in replacing Bayesian incentive compatibility by the stronger requirement of dominant strategies. We identify contexts where it is possible to change the transfer payments of a...

Choosing the best out of an increasing number of options requires reliable and accurate information. As our time and resources are limited, we commonly use the experience of others to take decisions. Reputation mechanisms aggregate in a formal way the feedback collected from peers and compute the “reputation” of products, services, or providers. They enjoy huge success and are believed to be th...

We study the bilateral trade problem: one seller, buyer and a single, indivisible item for sale. It is well known that there no fully-efficient incentive compatible mechanism this problem maintains balanced budget. design simple robust mechanisms obtain approximate efficiency with these properties. show even minimal use of statistical data can yield good approximation results. then demonstrate ...

Motivation. The recent literature on mechanism design provides a series of studies on robustness issues, motivated by the idea that a desirable mechanism should not rely too heavily on the agents’ common knowledge structure (Wilson, 1985). One approach is to adopt stronger solution concepts that are insensitive to various common knowledge assumptions, such as dominant-strategy incentive compati...