In a quasi-linear environment we characterize the boundaries of the set of transfers which implement a given allocation rule (extremal transfers). Doing so allows us to generalize and unify several existing results of the mechanism design literature. More specifically, our approach delivers a characterization result for the set of implementable allocation rules. Second, we obtain an exact chara...

Trading goods online has numerous advantages. One that is particularly compelling is that online merchants can offer their goods at lower prices compared to their offline counterparts. The physical distance between buyers and sellers, however, also leads to problems of trust. Consider the online auction site eBay as an example: its procedure is such that the winning bidder (henceforth the buyer...

We consider the design of forecasting competitions in which multiple forecasters make predictions about one or more independent events and compete for a single prize. We have two objectives: (1) to award the prize to the most accurate forecaster, and (2) to incentivize forecasters to report truthfully, so that forecasts are informative and forecasters need not spend any cognitive effort strateg...

The most prominent way to establish trust between buyers and sellers on online auction sites are reputation mechanisms. Two drawbacks of this approach are the reliance on the seller being long-lived and the susceptibility to whitewashing. In this paper, we introduce so-called escrow mechanisms that avoid these problems by installing a trusted intermediary which forwards the payment to the selle...

We study a model in which a "statistician" takes an action on behalf of an agent, based on a random sample involving other people. The statistician follows a penalized regression procedure: the action that he takes is the dependent variable’s estimated value given the agent’s disclosed personal characteristics. We ask the following question: Is truth-telling an optimal disclosure strategy for t...