manipulations by coalitions under asymmetric information the case of groves mechanisms abstract we study the formation in coalitions in vickrey clarke groves mechanisms in a model where we assume that asymmetry of information exists within coalitions the coalitions must therefore use an internal mechanism to give incentives to their members to reveal their information to each other we show that there exists no mechanism robust to all coalitions on the other hand there exist mechanisms robust to coalitions of two agents and any larger coalition that would form in these mechanisms would be subject to manipulation by subcoalitions we characterize these mechanisms and show in particular that they are never anonymous journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 d82

public research and industrial innovations in germany this paper deals with the effects of publicly funded research at universities polytechnics and federal research labs on industrial innovations in germany we discuss the characteristics of companies that benefit from the findings of public research institutions in questioning 2 300 companies we found that less than one tenth of product or process innovating firms introduced innovations between 1993 and 1995 that would not have been developed without public research these new products amount to approximately 5 percent of all new product sales regressions show that firms own r d support the ability to absorb the findings of public research and turn them into innovations contrary to the widely held opinion that proximity to public research institutions does promote collaboration between firms and public research and increase the amount of received knowledge spillovers we found no higher probability of publicly supported innovations for firms in germany that are located near universities or polytechnics

group incentive compatibility in a market with indivisible goods abstract in a market where each trader has one unit of an indivisible good there are procedures for exchanging goods which result in competitive allocations one of these procedures the top trading cycle has the property that it is in each trader s best interest to report his true preferences over the set of goods this note shows that no subset of traders can misrepresent their preferences and improve the allocation for all members of the subset additionally if there are no indifferences in the preferences then some traders in a subset that misrepresents preferences do worse

efficient resource allocation on the basis of priorities many institutions allocate resources by non market mechanisms based on priorities in this paper we introduce a model of resource allocation on the basis of priorities and address the following questions is it possible to allocate resources on the basis of any priority structure if yes when can we do this pareto efficiently without creating incentives for manipulation and consistently across different groups of agents and resource levels we adopt a basic indivisible objects model with a finite number of object types and a finite quota of goods of each type some interesting examples are the determination of access to education allocation of graduate houses offices or tasks agents are assumed to have strict preferences over object types and remaining unassigned an assignment is an allocation of the objects to the agents such that every agent receives at most one object a rule associates an assignment to each preference profile we formalize a priority structure to be a collection of strict priority rankings of individuals indexed by the object types where i a j would be read as i has higher priority for object a than j we assume that the priority structure is exogenously fixed and allow the preferences of the agents to vary a rule is said to violate a priority of i for a if there is a preference profile under which i envies j who is assigned a and publication information econometrica 70 6 november 2002 2489 2497 the copyright to this article is held by the econometric society http www econometricsociety org it may be downloaded printed and reproduced only for personal or classroom use absolutely no downloading or copying may be done for or on behalf of any for profit commercial firm or other commercial purpose without the explicit permission of the econometric society for this purpose contact julie p gordon executive director of the society at jpg northwestern edu i would like to thank faruk gul wolfgang pesendorfer the co editor the four anonymous referees and the participants of the micro theory lunch seminar in princeton university for their comments and suggestions

in the aftermath of the energy crisis new zealand s energy policy in the 1970s and 1980s abstract the past decade of energy policy in new zealand is analysed with respect to the country s dependence on imported oil energy conservation programmes and the use of renewable energy resources in all cases the country has failed to meet the objectives continually set forth in energy policy documents the recent corporatization strategy of the government with respect to energy planning and management makes the possibility of achieving integrated energy planning quite dubious even recent studies calling for resilient energy plans have only added ambiguity to this situation it is only through a coordinated and centralized strategy that these deficiencies can be overcome which is quite the opposite of the present policy focus

stable and efficient resource allocation under weak priorities abstract we study the indivisible object allocation problem without monetary transfer in which each object is endowed with a weak priority ordering over agents it is well known that stability is generally not compatible with efficiency we characterize the priority structures for which a stable and efficient assignment always exists as well as the priority structures that admit a stable efficient and group strategy proof rule while house allocation problems and housing markets are two classic families of allocation problems that admit a stable efficient and group strategy proof rule any priority augmented allocation problem with more than three objects admits such a rule if and only if it is decomposable into a sequence of subproblems each of which has the structure of a house allocation problem or a housing market

strategy proof exchange we consider the allocation of goods in exchange economies with a finite number of agents who may have private information about their preferences in such a setting standard allocation rules such as walrasian equilibria or rational expectations equilibria are not compatible with individual incentives we characterize the set of allocation rules which are incentive compatible or in other words the set of strategy proof social choice functions social choice functions which are strategy proof are those which can be obtained from trading according to a finite number of pre specified proportions the number of proportions which can be accommodated is proportional to the number of agents such rules are necessarily inefficient even in the limit as the economy grows

collective choice under dichotomous preferences abstract agents partition deterministic outcomes into good or bad a mechanism selects a lottery over outcomes time shares the probability of a good outcome is the canonical utility the utilitarian mechanism averages over outcomes with largest approval it is efficient strategyproof anonymous and neutral we reach an impossibility if in addition each agent s utility is at least 1 n where n is the number of agents or is at least the fraction of good to feasible outcomes we conjecture that no ex ante efficient and strategyproof mechanism guarantees a strictly positive utility to all agents and prove a weaker statement

collusion in second price auctions with heterogeneous bidders abstract we show that efficient collusion by any subset of bidders in second price private value auctions is possible even when the bidders are heterogeneous an important property of efficient collusion is that a bidder s net payoff from participating in collusion is independent of her valuation we show that the cooperative game whose characteristic function evaluated at a coalition is the ex ante collusive surplus of that coalition has a nonempty core a feature of more technical interest is the mechanism characterization when the private information of agents does not enter in a linear or even piecewise linear manner

strategic analysis of diffusion of renewable energy in the nordic countries abstract today there are concerns related to security of energy supply growing energy demands limitations of fossil fuels and threats of disruptive climate changes to overcome the challenges diversification and utilization of renewable energy resources are defined as the main strategies however successful diffusion of renewable energy requires consideration to many factors including social economic and technical ones nordic countries are among the leading countries on successful development of renewable energy and energy efficiency this research in the frame of a strategic conceptual analysis studies the policies and achievements of the nordic region in their development of renewable energy the framework consists of four layers including dimensions characters objectives and key schemes

collusive bidder behavior at single object second price and english auctions models of collusive bidder behavior at single object second price and english auctions are provided the ind ependent private values model is generalized to permit the formulatio n of coalitions and a strategic response by the auctioneer cooperati ve strategies are found to be dominant in these models coalitions of any size are viable and the payoff to each member increases with th e size of the coalition in addition the collusive strategies of the coalition represent a noncooperative equilibrium the optimal respon se of the auctioneer is to establish a reserve price that is a functi on of the coalition s size these and other features of the model are found to be consistent with the essential features of actual behavio r copyright 1987 by university of chicago press

manipulation and single peakedness a general result this article considers environments in which individual preferences are single peaked with respect to an unspecified but unidimensional ordering of the alternative space we show that in these environments any institution that is coalitionally strategy proof must be dictatorial thus any nondictatorial institutional environment that does not explicitly utilize an a priori ordering over alternatives in order torendera collectivedecisionis necessarilyprone to the strategic misrepresentation of preferences by an individual or a group moreover we prove in this environment that for any nondictatorial institution the truthful revelation of preferences can never be a dominant strategy equilibrium accordingly an incentive to behave insincerely is inherent to the vast majority of real world lawmaking systems even when the policy space is unidimensional and the core is nonempty t hequestionofmanipulation themisrepresentation of one s true preferences in order to achieve a more favorable collective decision has alternately intrigued and frustrated social scientists for over two centuries 1 manipulation is clearly a potential problem for those interested in drawing inferences from individuals observed behaviors for example how does a legislator s roll call vote relate to his or her policy preferences how does an individual voter s vote choice reflect his or her preferences over the parties and or candidates moresubtly doesthecompositionofalegislativecommittee reflect the preferences of the members of the legislature does a juror s vote to convict a defendant truthfully reflect the juror s beliefs about the defendant s guilt or innocence is the president s choice of political appointees indicative of the policies that he or she would pursue in their positions in short manipulation is simultaneously

academic research and industrial innovation the purpose of this study is to estimate the extent to which technological innovations in various industries have been based on recent academic research and the time lags between the investment in recent academic research projects and the industrial utilization of their findings because no attempt to my knowledge has been made to estimate the social rate of return from academic research we also make some rough and tentative estimates of this sort while the results are subject to many limitations discussed below they should be of interest to public policy makers concerned with science and technology as well as to

egalitarianism under earmark constraints agents with single peaked preferences share a resource coming from different suppliers each agent is connected to only a subset of suppliers examples include workload balancing sharing earmarked funds and rationing utilities after a storm unlike in the one supplier model in a pareto optimal allocation agents who get more than their peak from underdemanded suppliers coexist with agents who get less from overdemanded suppliers our egalitarian solution is the lorenz dominant pareto optimal allocation it treats agents with equal demands as equally as the connectivity constraints allow together strategyproofness pareto optimality and equal treatment of equals characterize our solution

institutions supporting technical advance in industry elsewhere 1982 economists beliefs that modern capitalism is a fine innovation generating machine have no intellectual grounding in contemporary neoclassical theory the twin theorems take technologies as given the apparent effectiveness of capitalism in this arena must reside in characteristics and mechanisms other than those featured in the microeconomic theory textbooks in our book we attempt to analyze these it also is true that the capitalist engine is a much more complicated one than many economists seem to think i presently am

house allocation with transfers we consider the shapley scarf house allocation problem where monetary transfers are allowed we characterize the class of mechanisms that are strategy proof ex post individually rational ex post budget balanced and collusion proof in these mechanisms the price of each object is fixed in advance and the objects are reallocated according to the unique core assignment of the shapley scarf economy associated with the prices the special case in which all prices are zero is the core mechanism studied by shapley and scarf our mechanisms are compelling alternatives to the groves mechanisms which satisfy neither budget balance nor our condition of collusion proofness journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 c78 d71 d78 d89

manipulation through bribes we consider allocation rules that choose outcomes and transfers based on agents reported valuations of the outcomes a bribing situation exists when one agent could pay another to misreport his valuations resulting in a net gain to both a bribe proof rule eliminates such opportunities we show that under a bribe proof rule each agent s payoff is a continuous function of other agents reported valuations furthermore on connected domains if the set of outcomes is finite or the domain is smoothly connected each agent s payoff is a constant function of other agents reports finally under a domain richness condition a bribe proof rule must be constant the results apply to a broad class of economies journal of economic literature classification numbers c70 d70

impact on firms of the use of knowledge external sources a systematic review of the literature this study summarizes the main conclusions from a systematic review of the empirical literature regarding the impact on firms of the use of knowledge external sources universities research institutes and knowledge intensive business services with the aim to organize the literature we classify the different works according to the research question addressed i which firms use knowledge external sources ii do firms using knowledge external sources achieve better results and iii which firms benefit the most from using knowledge external sources stylized facts are that larger more r d intensive and high tech firms are more likely to use knowledge external sources and that use of knowledge external sources is associated to firms higher technical results less attention has been paid to the third question and evidence is not conclusive several recommendations for future research emerge first to take in greater consideration methodological issues so that potential biases in the results caused by sample selection and endogeneity are handled properly second to pay more attention to heterogeneous outcomes third to use continuous indicators of depth and breadth of links allowing for non linear relationships and fourth to extend evidence for developing countries and service industries

when are local incentive constraints sufficient we study the question of whether local incentive constraints are sufficient to imply full incentive compatibility in a variety of mechanism design settings allowing for probabilistic mechanisms we give a unified approach that covers both continuous and discrete type spaces on many common preference domains including any convex domain of cardinal or ordinal preferences single peaked ordinal preferences and successive single crossing ordinal preferences local incentive compatibility suitably defined implies full incentive compatibility on domains of cardinal preferences that satisfy a strong nonconvexity condition local incentive compatibility is not sufficient our sufficiency results hold for dominant strategy and bayesian nash solution concepts and allow for some interdependence in preferences

strategyproof assignment by hierarchical exchange we give a characterization of the set of group strategyproof pareto optimal and reallocation proof allocation rules for the assignment problem where individuals are assigned at most one indivisible object without any medium of exchange although there are no property rights in the model the rules satisfying the above criteria imitate a trading procedure with individual endowments in which individuals exchange objects from their hierarchically determined endowment sets in an iterative manner in particular these assignment rules generalize gale s top trading cycle procedure the classical rule for the model in which each individual owns an indivisible good

individual versus group strategy proofness when do they coincide a social choice function is group strategy proof on a domain if no group of agents can manipulate its final outcome to their own benefit by declaring false preferences on that domain there are a number of economically significant domains where interesting rules satisfying individual strategy proofness can be defined and for some of them all these rules turn out to also satisfy the stronger requirement of group strategy proofness we provide conditions on domains guaranteeing that for all rules defined on them individual and group strategy proofness become equivalent we also provide a partial answer regarding the necessity of our conditions

assigning refugees to landlords in sweden efficient stable maximum matchings in this paper we investigate the problem of finding housing for refugees once they have been granted asylum in particular we demonstrate that market design can play an important role in a partial solution to the problem more specifically we investigate a specific matching system and we propose an easy to implement mechanism that finds an efficient stable and maximum matching such a matching guarantees that housing is efficiently provided to a maximum number of refugees and that no refugee prefers another specific landlord to their current match when at the same time that specific landlord prefers that refugee to their own current match

group incentive compatibility for matching with contracts abstract hatfield and milgrom hatfield john william milgrom paul r 2005 matching with contracts amer econ rev 95 913 935 present a unified model of matching with contracts which includes the standard two sided matching and some package auction models as special cases they show that the doctor optimal stable mechanism is strategy proof for doctors if hospitals preferences satisfy substitutes and the law of aggregate demand we show that the doctor optimal stable mechanism is group strategy proof for doctors under these same conditions that is no group of doctors can make each of its members strictly better off by jointly misreporting their preferences we derive as a corollary of this result that no individually rational allocation is preferred by all the doctors to the doctor optimal stable allocation

anatomy of a future energy crisis restructuring and the energy sector in new zealand abstract up until the mid 1980s new zealand had been characterized by an economy that was heavily protected extensively regulated and in which production was subsidized to a considerable extent in 1984 the government embarked upon a programme of extensive public sector and economic restructuring described by some as being among the most wide reaching and radical in new zealand s history for the energy sector the restructuring has meant a move away from an administrative infrastructure of the 1970s and 1980s that was strongly centralized and government led to one that is based much more on market forces energy development production and delivery have been corporatized and privatized the energy sector has been largely deregulated and government has disavowed itself of responsibility for energy resource management and policy the primary motivation that underlies all of the reform is economic efficiency concerns are widely held however for the implications that follow from this restructuring of the energy sector for the efficient management of energy resources security of supply long term management of the sector and for the maintenance of environmental quality it is possible that greater economic efficiencies might be achieved although this is by no means certain but it would seem that specific characteristics of the restructuring will militate strongly against the achievement of other objectives in the sector recommendations for amendment refer to the need to strike a sensible balance between market forces and government involvement

resource constraints as triggers of radical innovation longitudinal evidence from the manufacturing sector abstract despite the significant role of radical innovation as a driver of firm growth and performance the consequences of resource constraints for radical innovation outcomes remain unknown our paper addresses this gap we combine arguments from entrepreneurship theory and the theory of recombinative innovation to construct an overarching theoretical framework that argues why resource constraints can promote rather than impede radical innovation we then build hypotheses on two specific resource constraints knowledge and financial and test these by a lagged variable random effects tobit model with longitudinal data from an exceptionally large and detailed innovation survey controlling for absorptive capacity firm age and firm growth we find full support for the hypothesis that knowledge constraints spur radical innovation and partial support for the hypothesis that financial constraints spur radical innovation we discuss the theoretical significance of these findings and point to managerial implications and paths for future research

obviously strategy proof mechanisms what makes some strategy proof mechanisms easier to understand than others to address this question i propose a new solution concept a mechanism is obviously strategy proof osp if it has an equilibrium in obviously dominant strategies this has a behavioral interpretation a strategy is obviously dominant if and only if a cognitively limited agent can recognize it as weakly dominant it also has a classical interpretation a choice rule is osp implementable if and only if it can be carried out by a social planner under a particular regime of partial commitment i fully characterize the set of osp mechanisms in a canonical setting with one dimensional types and transfers a laboratory experiment tests and corroborates the theory

firms transfer strategies with universities and the relationship with firms innovation performance based on a representative sample of swiss firms we empirically investigated strategies for knowledge and technology transfer ktt activities between business firms and universities as well as other public research institutions based on a cluster analysis of 19 different forms for ktt three types of ktt strategies were identified they were significantly correlated mainly to i the absorptive capacity of a firm ii several factors hampering ktt activities and iii some characteristics of the transfer process such as the number of partners the existence of contacts to foreign universities and the utilization of the mediating services of transfer offices furthermore it was found that ktt strategies related to the core transfer activities such as r d contracts are stronger correlated with innovation performance compared to strategies related to softer transfer forms copyright 2009 the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

group strategy proofness in private good economies many salient rules to allocate private goods are not only strategyproof but also group strategy proof in appropriate domains of definition hence diminishing the traditional conflict between incentives and efficiency that is so for solutions to matching division cost sharing house allocation and auctions in spite of the substantive disparity between these cases in a general framework encompassing all of them we prove that the equivalence between the two forms of strategy proofness is due to an underlying common structure that transcends the many differences between the contexts and the mechanisms for which it holds jel c78 d44 d63 d71 d82

matching with contracts we develop a model of matching with contracts which incorporates as special cases the college admissions problem the kelso crawford labor market matching model and ascending package auctions we introduce a new law of aggregate demand for the case of discrete heterogeneous workers and show that when workers are substitutes this law is satisfied by profit maximizing firms when workers are substitutes and the law is satisfied truthful reporting is a dominant strategy for workers in a worker offering auction matching algorithm we also parameterize a large class of preferences satisfying the two conditions

matching with branch of choice contracts at the united states military academy branch selection is a key decision in a cadet s military career cadets at usma can increase their branch priorities at a fraction of slots by extending their service agreement this real life matching problem lls an important gap in market design literature although priorities fail a key substitutes condition the agent optimal stable mechanism is well dened and in contrast to the current usma mechanism it is fair stable and strategy proof adoption of this mechanism benets cadets and the army this new

strategy proof stochastic assignment abstract i study strategy proof assignment mechanisms where the agents reveal their preference rankings over the available objects a stochastic mechanism returns lotteries over deterministic assignments and mechanisms are compared according to first order stochastic dominance i show that non wasteful strategy proof mechanisms are not dominated by strategy proof mechanisms however non wastefulness is highly restrictive when the mechanism involves randomization in fact the random priority mechanism i e the random serial dictatorship and a recently adopted school choice mechanism deferred acceptance with random tie breaking are wasteful i find that both these mechanisms are dominated by strategy proof mechanisms in general strategy proof improvement cannot be due to merely reshuffling objects and therefore must involve assigning more objects

credible group stability in many to many matching problems abstract it is known that in two sided many to many matching problems pairwise stable matchings may not be immune to group deviations unlike in many to one matching problems blair 1988 in this paper we show that pairwise stability is equivalent to credible group stability when one side has responsive preferences and the other side has categorywise responsive preferences a credibly group stable matching is immune to any executable group deviations with an appropriate definition of executability under the same preference restriction we also show the equivalence between the set of pairwise stable matchings and the set of matchings generated by coalition proof nash equilibria of an appropriately defined strategic form game

random matching under dichotomous preferences we consider bilateral matching problems where each person views those on the other side of the market as either acceptable or unacceptable an acceptable mate is preferred to remaining single and the latter to an unacceptable mate all acceptable mates are welfare wise identical using randomization many efficient and fair matching methods define strategyproof revelation mechanisms randomly selecting a priority ordering of the participants is a simple example equalizing as much as possible the probability of getting an acceptable mate across all participants stands out for its normative and incentives properties the profile of probabilities is lorenz dominant and the revelation mechanism is group strategyproof for each side of the market our results apply to the random assignment problem as well

sex differentials in unemployment rates a case for no concern this paper reevaluates the concept of unemployment in the context of differing labor market and nonmarket opportunities for men and women discussing common fallacies in female to male unemployment rate comparisons and their use as an indicator of labor market equality suggestive empirical evidence is presented for an alternative unemployment rate concept for women for interpreting the procyclical variation in female to male unemployment rate differentials and for decomposing unemployment differences into differences in labor market characteristics and in behavioral coefficients for the two sexes the paper concludes that a large part of the observed unemployment rate differential may be attributed to the definition and methodology used in deriving unemployment statistics rather than to discrimination in productive opportunities

strategy proof and symmetric social choice functions for public good economies we study economies with one private good and one pure public good and consider the following axioms of social choice functions strategy proofness says that no agent can benefit by misrepresenting his preferences regardless of whether the other agents misrepresent or not and whatever his preferences are symmetry says that if two agents have the same preference they must be treated equally anonymity says that when the preferences of two agents are switched their consumption bundles are also switched individual rationality says that a social choice function never assigns an allocation which makes some agent worse off than he would be by consuming no public good and paying nothing in theorem 1 we characterize the class of strategy proof budget balancing and symmetric social choice functions assuming convexity of the cost function of the public good in theorem 2 we characterize the class of strategy proof budget balancing and anonymous social choice functions in theorem 3 we characterize the class of strategy proof budget balancing symmetric and individually rational social choice functions

bidding for army career specialties improving the rotc branching mechanism motivated by the low retention rates of us military academy and reserve officer training corps graduates the army recently introduced incentives programs in which cadets could bid 3 years of additional service obligation to obtain higher priority for their desired branches the full potential of this incentives program is not utilized because of the rotc s deficient matching mechanism i propose a design that eliminates these shortcomings and mitigates several policy problems the army has identified in contrast to the rotc mechanism my design utilizes market principles more extensively and it is a hybrid between a market mechanism and a priority based allocation mechanism