This paper characterizes public and private monitoring technologies with respect to which the efficient outcome is approximately implementable in team production by way of ex post budget-balanced linear transfers. JEL Classification: D21, D23, D82.

We consider a budget-constrained mechanism designer who selects an optimal set of projects to maximize her utility. A project’s cost is private information and its value for the designer may vary. In this allocation problem, the selection of projects both which and how many is endogenously determined by the mechanism. The designer faces ex-post constraints: The participation and budget constrai...

In this paper we propose di¤erent criteria to rank income distributions according to equality of opportunity. Di¤erent from existing ones, our criteria explicitly recognize the interplay between circumstances and e¤ort. We characterize them axiomatically and we compare them with existing criteria; then we propose some scalar measures. We show that our ex post criteria are mostly obtained from "...

How do people think about fairness in settings with uncertainty? One view holds that fairness requires equality of opportunity; another holds that it requires equality of outcomes. Relative to the resolution of uncertainty, the first view takes an ex ante perspective, while the second takes an ex post perspective. In this paper, we conduct a laboratory experiment designed to determine which per...

Consider an estimate of the common value of an auctioned asset that is symmetric in the bidders’types. Such an estimate can be represented solely in terms of the order statistics of those types. This representation forms the basis for a pricing rule yielding truthful bidding as an equilibrium, whether bidders’types are a¢ liated or independent. We highlight the link between the estimator and fu...

An analogue of Vickrey’s (1961) multi-unit auction is provided when bidders have interdependent values. The analogue is strategically equivalent to a collection of two-bidder single-unit second-price auctions and it possesses an ex-post e¢cient equilibrium. As an application of this result, it is shown that the FCC auction possesses an e¢cient equilibrium in the case of homogeneous goods. Condi...

We characterize ex post incentive compatible public decision rules, and apply this characterization to (i) bilateral trade and (ii) public good provision.

The sensitivity of Bayesian implementation to agents’beliefs about others suggests the use of more robust notions of implementation such as ex-post implementation, which requires that each agent’s strategy be optimal for every possible realization of the types of other agents. We show that the only deterministic social choice functions that are ex-post implementable in generic mechanism design ...

Variance estimation is central to many questions in finance and economics. Until now ex-post variance estimation has been based on infill asymptotic assumptions that exploit high-frequency data. This paper offers a new exact finite sample approach to estimating ex-post variance using Bayesian nonparametric methods. In contrast to the classical counterpart, the proposed method exploits pooling o...