Related papers: Dynamic Mechanism Design without Monetary Transfer…

This paper studies the optimal mechanism to motivate effort in a dynamic principal-agent model without transfers. An agent is engaged in a task with uncertain future rewards and can quit at any time. The principal knows the reward and…

This paper presents a new condition for the existence of optimal stationary policies in average-cost continuous-time Markov decision processes with unbounded cost and transition rates, arising from controlled queueing systems. This…

We consider a dynamic server allocation problem over parallel queues with randomly varying connectivity and server switchover delay between the queues. At each time slot the server decides either to stay with the current queue or switch to…

We study the problem in which a central planner sequentially allocates a single resource to multiple strategic agents using their utility reports at each round, but without using any monetary transfers. We consider general agent utility…

We consider a model of nomadic agents exploring and competing for time-varying location-specific resources, arising in crowdsourced transportation services, online communities, and in traditional location based economic activity. This model…

I study the optimal allocation of positional goods in the presence of externalities arising from consumers' concerns about relative consumption. Applications include luxury goods, priority services, education, and organizational…

Incentives are more likely to elicit desired outcomes when they are designed based on accurate models of agents' strategic behavior. A growing literature, however, suggests that people do not quite behave like standard economic agents in a…

We consider a general formulation of the Principal-Agent problem with a lump-sum payment on a finite horizon, providing a systematic method for solving such problems. Our approach is the following: we first find the contract that is optimal…

We study allocation problems without monetary transfers where agents have correlated types, i.e., hold private information about one another. Such peer information is relevant in various settings, including science funding, allocation of…

We study a problem of optimal allocation in a discrete-time multi-period pure-exchange economy, where agents have preferences over stochastic endowment processes that are represented by strongly time-consistent dynamic risk measures. We…

We revisit the problem of designing strategyproof mechanisms for allocating divisible items among two agents who have linear utilities, where payments are disallowed and there is no prior information on the agents' preferences. The…

Small-to-medium size enterprises (SMEs), including many startup firms, need to manage interrelated flows of cash and inventories of goods. In this paper, we model a firm that can finance its inventory (ordered or manufactured) with loans in…

In this paper, we consider the classic stochastic (dynamic) knapsack problem, a fundamental mathematical model in revenue management, with general time-varying random demand. Our main goal is to study the optimal policies, which can be…

A simple mechanism for allocating indivisible resources is sequential allocation in which agents take turns to pick items. We focus on possible and necessary allocation problems, checking whether allocations of a given form occur in some or…

In this paper, we study a stock-rationing queue with two demand classes by means of the sensitivity-based optimization, and develop a complete algebraic solution to the optimal dynamic rationing policy. We show that the optimal dynamic…

We consider the classical mathematical economics problem of {\em Bayesian optimal mechanism design} where a principal aims to optimize expected revenue when allocating resources to self-interested agents with preferences drawn from a known…

Good economic mechanisms depend on the preferences of participants in the mechanism. For example, the revenue-optimal auction for selling an item is parameterized by a reserve price, and the appropriate reserve price depends on how much the…

We study the problem of designing an optimal sequence of incentives that a principal should offer to an agent so that the agent's optimal behavior under the incentives realizes the principal's objective expressed as a temporal logic…

We investigate the optimal pricing strategy in a service-providing framework, where customers can leave the system prior to service completion. In this setting, a price is quoted to an incoming customer based on the current number of…

We introduce a novel family of mechanisms for constrained allocation problems which we call local priority mechanisms. These mechanisms are parameterized by a function which assigns a set of agents, the local compromisers, to every…