Introduction "Long long ago, when wishing still could lead to something, there lived a king whose daughters all were beautiful, but the youngest was so beautiful that the sun itself, who has seen so many things, simply marveled every time it shone on her face." (Grimms' Fairy Tales, No.1, The Frog King) From this brief snippet of a fairy tale and its title, we already know and understand much o...

In this paper I study the possibility of full surplus extraction on arbitrary type spaces, with three main results: (i) I characterize full surplus extraction, (ii) I characterize full surplus extraction assuming that the surplus-extracting allocation is implementable, and (iii) I show that virtually full surplus extraction implies full surplus extraction. The characterizing condition in (ii) a...

Crowdsourcing systems leverage short bursts of focused attention from many contributors to achieve a goal. By requiring people’s full attention, existing crowdsourcing systems fail to leverage people’s cognitive surplus in the many settings for which they may be distracted, performing or waiting to perform another task, or barely paying attention. In this paper, we study opportunities for lowef...