We consider optimal mechanism design for a sequencing problem with n jobs which require a compensation payment for waiting. The jobs’ processing requirements as well as unit costs for waiting are private data. Given public priors for this private data, we seek to find an optimal mechanism, that is, a scheduling rule and incentive compatible payments that minimize the total expected payments to ...

Under the table or informal payments in several middle and low income countries is a serious impediment to health care reform. These payments are effectively a form of systemic corruption. This report shows the efforts of a patient who seek health care for his ankle while being requested to pay under the table in hospital and private clinic. The data were collected by interview and surveying pa...

The main focus of this paper is agrobiodiversity and its effects on agricultural production within agricultural landscapes. The interest is to shed light about the fundamental causes of agrobiodiversity loss by focusing upon the institutional or meso-economic environment that mediates farmers’ decentralized decisions. Since the main causes of farmers’ decisions to ‘disinvest’ in agrobiodiversit...

Future wage payments drive a wedge between total firm output and the output share received by the firm’s owners, thus potentially distorting strategic decisions by the firm’s owners such as, e.g., whether to continue the firm, sell it, or shut it down. Using an optimal contracting approach, we show that the unique optimal firm-wide employee compensation scheme from this perspective is a broad-b...

With the growth in Internet capable devices, users expect to be able to access the Internet at all times. Wireless access points are abundant but users cannot access them because of restrictions placed by the owners of the access points. One of the main reasons for this is compensation; owners do not want to give access for free when they are paying for it. This could be resolved by owners acce...

Mechanism design is considered in the context of fair allocations of indivisible goods with monetary compensation, by focusing on problems where agents’ declarations on allocated goods can be verified before payments are performed. A setting is considered where verification might be subject to errors, so that payments have to be awarded under the presumption of innocence, as incorrect declared ...