We introduce a dynamic model in which the ability of agents to perform certain welfare improving transactions is subject to random and unobservable shocks. We characterize the optimal setup for incentive compatible transactions, the optimal payment system. Implementation involves assigning balances to individual agents and optimally adjusting these balances given the agents’ histories of transa...

We consider the standard mechanism design environment with linear utility but without monetary transfers. We establish an equivalence between deterministic, dominant strategy incentive compatible mechanisms and generalized median voter schemes, and we use this equivalence to characterize the constrained-efficient optimal mechanism for an utilitarian planner. ∗Gershkov: Department of Economics, ...

We use tropical geometry to analyze finite valued mechanisms. We geometrically characterize all mechanisms on arbitrary type spaces, derive geometric and algebraic criteria for weak monotonicity, incentive compatibility and revenue equivalence. As corollaries we obtain various results known in the literature and shed new light on their nature.

These lecture notes cover two lectures from EECS 510, Algorithmic Mechanism Design, offered at Northwestern University in the Spring 2008 term. They cover the topic of frugality in mechanism design. Prerequisites for reading these lecture notes are basic understanding of algorithms and complexity as well as elementary calculus and probability theory. I will also assume that the reader has acces...

We investigate mechanism design without payments when agents have different types of preferences. Contrary to most settings in the literature where agents have the same preference, e.g. in the facility location games all agents would like to stay close to (or away from) the facility, we demonstrate the limitation of mechanism design without payments when agents have different preferences by int...

This paper relaxes an important assumption of the mechanism design literature: That communication between the principal and each of his agents is public. Doing so yields two important results. First, it simplifies significantly mechanisms and institutions and shows the major role played by sell-out contracts, nonlinear prices and all-pay auctions. Second, it restores continuity with respect to ...

This paper studies an auction design problem for a seller to sell a commodity in a social network, where each individual (the seller or a buyer) can only communicate with her neighbors. The challenge to the seller is to design a mechanism to incentivize the buyers, who are aware of the auction, to further propagate the information to their neighbors so that more buyers will participate in the a...

This paper addresses how hard evidence can be incorporated into mechanismdesign analysis. Two classes of models are compared: (a) ones in which evidentiary decisions are accounted for explicitly, and (b) ones in which the players make abstract declarations of their types. Conditions are provided under which versions of these models are equivalent. The paper also addresses whether dynamic mechan...

My research interest primarily lies in theoretical computer science and more specifically in approximation algorithms and game theory. In the first half of my Ph.D. the focus of my research was mostly on approximation algorithms. After spending a summer at Yahoo! as an intern, I became interested in the sponsored search problems and as a result the new field of algorithmic game theory which is ...

We study an incomplete information game in which players can coordinate their actions by contracting among themselves. We model this relationship as a reciprocal contracting procedure where each player has the ability to make commitments contingent on the other players’commitments. We characterize the outcomes that can be supported as perfect Bayesian equilibrium outcomes in this reciprocal con...