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When delegations to an assembly or council represent differently sized constituencies, they are often allocated voting weights which increase in population numbers (EU Council, US Electoral College, etc.). The Penrose square root rule (PSRR) is the main benchmark for ‘fair representation’ of all bottom-tier voters in the top-tier decision making body, but rests on the restrictive assumption of independent binary decisions. We consider intervals of alternatives with single-peaked preferences instead, and presume positive correlation of local voters. This calls for a replacement of the PSRR by a linear Shapley rule : representation is fair if the Shapley value of the delegates is proportional to their constituency sizes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The operation of the posted offer market with advance production environment ( Mestelman and Welland, 1988 ), appropriately parameterized, differs from that of the market entry game ( Selten and Güth, 1982 ), appropriately presented, only in terms of price-setting. We establish the effect of this difference in price-setting on attainment of the competitive equilibrium allocation while controlling for effects relating to the presentation of the market entry game and to the stationarity or non-stationarity of environment. Free posting of prices promotes convergence to the competitive equilibrium allocation, while the typical market entry game data can be characterized as displaying cycling prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the private values single object auction model, we construct a satisfactory mechanism – a symmetric, dominant strategy incentive compatible, and budget-balanced mechanism. The mechanism converges to efficiency at an exponential rate. It allocates the object to the highest valued agent with more than 99% probability provided there are at least 14 agents. It is also ex-post individually rational. We show that our mechanism is optimal in a restricted class of satisfactory ranking mechanisms. Since achieving efficiency through a dominant strategy incentive compatible and budget-balanced mechanism is impossible in this model, our results illustrate the limits of this impossibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An agent who is imperfectly informed about his binary quality can voluntarily participate in a test that generates a public signal. I study the design of the test that allows for optimal learning of the agent's quality when the agent strives for a high perception of his quality but is averse towards perception risk. For a large class of reduced-form utility functions that reflect these properties, the optimal test is binary and not subject to false positives. I uncover the forces that drive this result and show how the problem with endogenous participation can be transformed into a problem to that the concavification approach from the Bayesian persuasion literature applies. Furthermore, for a non-reduced version of my model where the designer estimates the agent's quality but suffers either more from false positives or from false negatives, I show that the same type of test is optimal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the performance and incentive compatibility of voting rules in a Bayesian environment: agents have independent private values, there are at least three alternatives, and monetary transfers are prohibited. First, we show that in a neutral environment, meaning alternatives are symmetric ex-ante, essentially any ex-post Pareto efficient ordinal rule is incentive compatible. Importantly, however, we can improve upon ordinal rules. We show that we can design an incentive compatible cardinal rule which achieves higher utilitarian social welfare than any ordinal rule. Finally, we provide numerical findings about incentive compatible cardinal rules that maximize utilitarian social welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes two-stage rank-order tournaments. To influence efforts in the two periods, a principal can use the intertemporal prize structure and the weight of first-period performance in the second-period prize. These two instruments implement different sets of effort vectors. We characterize the optimal combination of prizes and weights as a function of parameters. For large parameter regions, the principal should only give a second-period prize, but use positive first-period performance weights. This holds no matter whether efforts in different periods are perfect or imperfect substitutes and whether the principal gives feedback on performance or not. We also generalize existing results on whether giving feedback is beneficial for the principal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Groves and Ledyard (1977) construct a mechanism for public goods procurement that can be viewed as a direct-revelation Groves mechanism in which agents announce a parameter of a quadratic approximation of their true preferences. The mechanism's Nash equilibrium outcomes are efficient. The budget is balanced because Groves mechanisms are balanced for the announced quadratic preferences. Tian (1996) subsequently discovered a richer set of budget-balancing preferences. We replicate the Groves–Ledyard construction using this expanded set of preferences, and uncover a new set of complex mechanisms that generalize the original Groves–Ledyard mechanism. The original mechanism, however, remains the most appealing in terms of both simplicity and stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rules of k names are two-stage procedures where a first set of agents, the proposers, select k individuals from a set of candidates, and then another agent, the chooser, appoints one among those k in the list. The list of k names is often arrived at by letting each of the proposers vote for v candidates and then choosing those k with the highest support. We then speak of v -rules of k names. We study how different choices of the parameters v and k affect the balance of power between the proposers and the choosers. We analyze a strategic game where the proposers interact to determine what list of candidates to submit. We investigate the impact of the choice of parameters v and k upon the distribution of power among the proposers and the chooser, and we discuss how to eventually balance it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study legislative bargaining with two person teams versus individuals. Teams come closer to the predictions of the stationary subgame perfect equilibrium, passing minimum winning coalitions (MWCs) more often and having significantly more proposer power. The increase in proposer power results from increased numbers of MWCs, along with increased proposer power within an MWC. We investigate the driving forces behind teams coming closer to the theoretical predictions. The results favor their greater insightfulness as opposed to being more aggressive or more selfish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Egalitarianism and meritocracy are competing principles to distribute the joint benefits of cooperation. We examine the consequences of letting members of society vote between those two principles, in a context where individuals must join with others into coalitions of a certain size to become productive. Our setup induces a hedonic game of coalition formation. We study the existence of core stable partitions (organizational structures) of this game. We show that the inability of voters to commit to one distributional rule or another is a potential source of instability. But we also prove that, when stable organizational structures exist, they may be rich in form, and different than those predicted by alternative models of coalition formation. Non-segregated coalitions may arise within core stable structures. Stability is also compatible with the coexistence of meritocratic and egalitarian coalitions. These phenomena are robust, and persist under alternative variants of our initial model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the quality (informativeness and efficiency) of advice obtained from a committee of careerist experts where voting is secret but voting profiles are ‘leaked’ with an exogenously given probability. We show that fully informative voting is achievable only when the common prior is not too informative, the committee uses the unanimity rule and faces random leakage. It is then shown that informativeness and efficiency are mutually exclusive properties of committees with careerist experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a pairwise kidney exchange model. Roth et al. (2005) define priority matchings of the model and introduce a mechanism to derive them. In this paper, we re-examine the priority matching. First, we consider a general priority ordering where multiple patients may hold equal priority. We provide a characterization of the priority matchings by using the concept of alternating paths. Using the characterization, we examine the effect of a small change in the priority order on a set of priority matchings. Moreover, we provide an efficient method to find a priority matching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We address the common scenario where a group of agents wants to divide a set of items fairly, and at the same time seeks to optimize a global goal. Suppose that each item is a task and we want to find an allocation that minimizes the completion time of the last task in an envy-free manner, where no agent prefers anyone else's allocated task bundle over its own. This optimization goal is called makespan minimization , and the agents are often treated as machines. We give tight deterministic bounds for: (1) two unrelated machines; and (2) m ≥ 2 related machines. A natural question to ask is whether envy-free pricing techniques can improve the current known bounds for truthful mechanisms for the task-scheduling problem studied in the seminal paper of Nisan and Ronen (2001) . We find that for two unrelated machines, envy-free in-expectation is a far weaker constraint (i.e. less restrictive) than truthful in-expectation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We offer complete characterizations of the equilibrium outcomes of two prominent agenda voting institutions that are widely used in the democratic world: the amendment, also known as the Anglo-American procedure, and the successive, or equivalently the Euro-Latin procedure. Our axiomatic approach provides a proper understanding of these voting institutions, and allows comparisons between them, and with other voting procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]