Donald E. Campbell – författare

Resource Allocation Mechanisms derives the general welfare properties of systems in which individuals are motivated by self-interest. Satisfactory outcomes will emerge only if individual incentives are harnessed by means of a communication and payoff process, or mechanism, involving every agent. Professor Campbell employs a formal and abstract model of a mechanism that brings into prominence the criteria by which the performance of an economy is to be judged. The mechanism approach is used to prove some fundamental theorems about the possibility of designing an economic system satisfying the criteria. It also establishes a way of thinking about economic issues that is becoming increasingly useful in special branches of economics, such as industrial organization and public finance. This book can be viewed as two different texts: one constitutes an introduction to the theory of mechanism design and the other is a treatment of welfare economics with conventional emphasis on Pareto optimality as well as providing substantial material on incentives, uncertainty, and existence of equilibrium.

When incentives work well, individuals prosper. When incentives are poor, the pursuit of self-interest is self-defeating. This book is wholly devoted to the topical subject of incentives from individual, collective, and institutional standpoints. This third edition is fully updated and expanded, including a new section on the 2007-08 financial crisis and a new chapter on networks as well as specific applications of school placement for students, search engine ad auctions, pollution permits, and more. Using worked examples and lucid general theory in its analysis, and seasoned with references to current and past events, Incentives: Motivation and the Economics of Information examines: the performance of agents hired to carry out specific tasks, from taxi drivers to CEOs; the performance of institutions, from voting schemes to medical panels deciding who gets kidney transplants; a wide range of market transactions, from auctions to labor markets to the entire economy. Suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying incentives as part of courses in microeconomics, economic theory, managerial economics, political economy, and related areas of social science.