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We formalize the definition of symmetric auctions to study fundamental properties of incentive compatible auction protocols. We characterize such auction protocols for those with a fixed number of items to sell and study some important properties of those with an indefinite number of sales.

Theoretical models of guaranteed renewable insurance display front-loaded premium schedules. Such schedules both cover lifetime total claims of low-risk and high-risk individuals and provide an incentive for those who remain low-risk to continue to purchase the policy. Questions have been raised of whether actual individual insurance markets in the US approximate the behavior predicted by these...

Information diffusion and influence maximization in social networks are well studied problems and various models and algorithms have been proposed. The main assumption in these studies is that the influence probabilities are known to the social planner. The influence probabilities, however can vary significantly with the type of the information and the time at which the information is propagati...

We revisit the problem of incentive-compatible interdomain routing, examining the quite realistic special case in which the utilities of autonomous systems (ASes) are linear functions of the traffic in the incident links and the traffic leaving each AS. We show that incentive-compatibility toward maximizing total welfare is achievable efficiently, and in the uncapacitated case, by an algorithm ...

We investigate how explicit performance incentives in incomplete employment contracts interact with agents’ voluntary cooperation in one-shot and repeated gift-exchange experiments. If contracts are incentive compatible, agents choose their best-reply effort and there is no voluntary cooperation. By contrast, there is substantial voluntary cooperation if the contract is not incentive compatible...

Service providers lease bandwidth from owners of individual links to form desired routes. Bandwidth is leased in indivisible amounts, say multiples of 100 Mbps. We study the interaction between buyers and sellers of bandwidth. Within a conventional market, we showed in [8] that a competitive equilibrium exists if agents’ utilities are linear in bandwidth (and money) and they truthfully reveal t...

We consider a general scheme to construct Bayesian incentive-compatible mechanisms using a suitable ‘variable mechanism parametrization.’ The key idea is to perturb a given direct mechanism, which might not be truth revealing, introducing sufficient variability as a function of agents’ announcements to generate incentives for truthful revelation. We discuss a variable-price auction in a general...

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