Electronic Commerce (EC) has rapidly grown with the expansion of the Internet. Among these activities, auctions have recently achieved huge popularity, and have become a promising field for applying agent and Artificial Intelligence technologies. Although the Internet provides an infrastructure for much cheaper auctioning with many more sellers and buyers, we must consider the possibility of a ...

This special report synthesizes the findings of a Health Care Financing Administration grant which allowed the author to analyze hospital finance in six foreign countries and in the United States. The author identified the principal problems facing hospital owners, carriers, and governments in the United States, and he conducted lengthy field work abroad to learn how each country dealt with the...

We study cost-sharing mechanisms for several fundamental NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. A cost-sharing mechanism is a protocol that, given bids for a service, determines which bidders to serve and what prices to charge. The mechanism incurs a subset-dependent cost that is implicitly defined by an instance of a combinatorial optimization problem. Three desirable but mutually incomp...

The choice of strategies by bidders who are allowed to communicate in auctions is studied. Using the tools of mechanism design, the possible outcomes of communication between bidders participating in a series of simultaneous rst-price auctions are investigated. A variety of mechanisms are incentive compatible when side payments are not allowed. When attention is restricted to mechanisms that re...

This paper provides a micro-foundation for approximate incentive compatibility using ambiguity aversion. In particular, we propose novel notion of interim compatibility, local and establish an equivalence between in Bayesian environment exact the presence small degree ambiguity. We then apply our result to implementation efficient allocations. identify two economic settings—including ones which...

The idea of perfect competition for an economy with asymmetric information is formalized via an idiosyncratic signal process in which the private signals of almost every individual agent can influence only a negligible group of agents, and the individual agents’ relevant signals are essentially pairwise independent conditioned on the true states of nature. Thus, there is no incentive for an ind...

I study efficient multi-unit auction design when bidders have private values, multiunit demands, and non-quasilinear preferences. Without quasilinearity, the Vickrey auction loses its desired incentive and efficiency properties. Instead of assuming that bidders have quasilinear preferences, I assume that bidders have positive wealth effects. This nests cases where bidders are risk averse, face ...

I study e cient multi-unit auction design when bidders have private values, multiunit demands, and non-quasilinear preferences. Without quasilinearity, the Vickrey auction loses its desired incentive and e ciency properties. Instead of assuming that bidders have quasilinear preferences, I assume that bidders have positive wealth effects. This nests cases where bidders are risk averse, face fina...

Consider a supply chain in which a product must pass through multiple sites located in series before it is finally delivered to outside customers. Incentive problems may arise in this system when decisions are delegated to corresponding site managers, each maximizing his/her own performance metric. From the overall system’s point of view, the decentralized supply chain may not be as efficient a...

This paper considers firm’s compatibility choice across generations of products in a duopoly setting. In particular, we analyse a situation where the combination of two compatible product systems yields higher surplus than the sum of the surplus that a consumer obtains from the two systems individually. It is shown that if maintaining compatibility is costly, depending on both firms’ first-peri...