" We show that, in markets with indivisibilities (typified by the Shapley-Scarf housing market), the strict core mechanism is categorically determined by three assumptions: individual rationality, Pareto optimality and strategy-proofness.

An exciting application of crowdsourcing is to use social networks in complex task execution. In this paper, we address the problem of a planner who needs to incentivize agents within a network in order to seek their help in executing an atomic task as well as in recruiting other agents to execute the task. We study this mechanism design problem under two natural resource optimization settings:...

If shortest jobs are served first, splitting a long job into smaller jobs reported under different aliases, will reduce the actual wait until completion. If longest jobs are served first, the dual maneuver of merging several jobs under a single reported identity is profitable. Both manipulations can be avoided if the scheduling order is random, and users care only about the expected wait until ...

Due to users’ fast-growing demands, wireless spectrum is becoming a more and more scarce resource. However, the state of spectrum usage shows that while large chunks of spectrum are left idle at many places, many emerging wireless applications cannot get enough spectrum to provide their services. In contrast to existing truthful mechanisms for channel redistribution, which achieve strategy-proo...

A deterministic server is shared by users with identical linear waiting costs, requesting jobs of arbitrary lengths. Shortest jobs are served ...rst for e¢ciency. When the server can monitor the length of a job, but not the identity of its user, merging, splitting or partially transferring jobs may o¤er strategic opportunities to cooperative agents. Can we design cash transfers to neutralize su...

We analyze markets in which the price of a traded commodity is such that the supply and the demand are unequal. Under standard assumptions, the agents then have single peaked preferences on their consumption or production choices. For such markets, we propose a class of Uniform Trade rules each of which determines the volume of trade as the median of total demand, total supply, and an exogenous...

When aggregating information from a group of agents, accepting the pieces of information shared by all agents is a natural requirement. In this paper, we investigate such a unanimity condition in the setting of propositional merging. We discuss two interpretations of the unanimity condition. We show that the first interpretation is captured by existing postulates for merging. But the second int...

Confidence intervals are commonly used to describe parameter uncertainty. In nonstandard problems, however, their frequentist coverage property does not guarantee that they do so in a reasonable fashion. For instance, confidence intervals may be empty or extremely short with positive probability, even if they are based on inverting powerful tests. We apply a betting framework and a notion of be...