Studies in Economic Design – serie

This collection of essays represents responses by over eighty scholars to an unusual request: give your high level assessment of the field of economic design, as broadly construed. Where do we come from? Where do we go from here? The book editors invited short, informal reflections expressing deeply felt but hard to demonstrate opinions, unsupported speculation, and controversial views of a kind one might not normally risk submitting for review. The contributors – both senior researchers who have shaped the field and promising, younger researchers – responded with a diverse collection of provocative pieces, including: retrospective assessments or surveys of the field; opinion papers; reflections on critical points for the development of the discipline; proposals for the immediate future; "science fiction"; and many more. The readers should have fun reading these unusual pieces – as much as the contributors enjoyed writing them.

This collection of essays represents responses by over eighty scholars to an unusual request: give your high level assessment of the field of economic design, as broadly construed. Where do we come from? Where do we go from here? The book editors invited short, informal reflections expressing deeply felt but hard to demonstrate opinions, unsupported speculation, and controversial views of a kind one might not normally risk submitting for review. The contributors – both senior researchers who have shaped the field and promising, younger researchers – responded with a diverse collection of provocative pieces, including: retrospective assessments or surveys of the field; opinion papers; reflections on critical points for the development of the discipline; proposals for the immediate future; "science fiction"; and many more. The readers should have fun reading these unusual pieces – as much as the contributors enjoyed writing them.

This book contains invited essays in memory of Leonid Hurwicz spanning a large area of economic, social and other sciences where the implementation or enforcement of institutions and rules requires the design of effective mechanisms. The foundations of these articles are set by social choice concepts; game theory; Nash, Bayesian and Walrasian equilibria; complete and incomplete information. Besides in-depth treatments of well-established parts of mechanism and implementation theory, contributions on novel directions deal, for instance, with a quantum approach to game and decision making under uncertainty; digitalization; and the design of block chain for trading. The outstanding competence and reputation of the authors reflect the appreciation of the fundamental contributions and the lasting admiration of the personality and the work of Leonid Hurwicz.

This book, Advances in Economic Design, celebrates the birth of SED, the Society for Economic Design. It grew out of SED 2000, the first International Conference of the Society for Economic Design, which took place in istanbul during 23-27 lune, 2000. While it is not a proceedings or even a selected proceedings volume, it nevertheless contains many chapters which derive from papers presented at SED 2000, although they have typically been substantially reworked, extended and deepened. Of course, all the papers published in this book were anonymously refe­ reed. As a collection of selected essays, the book displays the state of the art across a broad spectrum of theoretical questions and topics and areas of application which economic designers are investigating. This characteristic of the book is reflected in its organization into seven parts: (A) Social Choice and Electoral Systems, (B) Buyers and SeIlers, (C) Bargaining, (D) Coalitional Stability and Efficiency, (E) Regulating and Organizing Markets, (F) Designing Rights, (G) Information. Most of the chapters of this book were edited for their English. Ms. ludith Tucker edited Chapters A2, A3, BI, B3, Cl, C4, DI, D2, D3, E2, E3, F2, F3 and F4, while Dr. Noah Hardy linguistically edited Chapters B2, B4 and C3. We thank Ms. Tucker and Dr. Hardy for their diligent support in this regard.

The theory of social choice deals with both the processes and results of col­ lective decision making. In this book, we explore some issues in the theory of social choice and mechanism design. We examine the premises of this theory, the axiomatic approach, and the mechanism design approach. The main questions are what is collective interest, how is it related to individuals' interests, how should one design social interactions, laws, and in­ stitutions? These questions are not new. Philosophers, social scientists have indeed pondered upon them for years. And, in fact, the organizational struc­ tures of many social institutions -courts, parliaments, committees and reg­ ulatory boards -often lack a sound theoretical base. This is not surprising, as it is, indeed, difficult to provide for a comprehensive formalization of the activities of such organizations. Nevertheless, there has been a definite trend towards providing clear and unambiguous rules for collective decision mak­ ing. These very rules constitute the body of social choice theory and its main object. The basic problem of social choice We explain here more precisely what a problem of social choice is, what approaches might be used to tackle it, and what kind of solutions it leads to. We introduce a few basic notions in preliminarily fashion and, in doing so, we stress both motivations and explanations.

When Murat Sertel asked us whether we would be interested in organizing a special issue of the Review of Economic Design on the formation of networks and groups, we were happy to accept because of the growing research on this important topic. We were also pleasantly surprised at the response to our request for submissions to the special issue, receiving a much larger number of sub­ missions than we had anticipated. In the end we were able to put together two special issues of insightful papers on this topic. Given the growing interest in this topic, we also decided (with encouragement from Murat) to combine the special issues in the form of a book for wider dissemination. However, once we had decided to edit the book, it was natural to move beyond the special issue to include at least some of the papers that have been influential in the literature on the formation of networks. These papers were published in other journals, and we are very grateful to the authors as well as the journals for permission to include these papers in the book.

The book is a collection of contributed papers in honor of Roy Radner. Reflecting Radner's broad range of research interests, the papers cover quite diverse areas, ranging over general equilibrium analysis of the market mechanism, economies undergoing transition, satisficing behavior, markets with asymmetric information, organizational resource allocation and information processing, incentives and implementation, stable sets and the core, stochastic sequential bargaining games, perfect equilibria in a macro growth model, repeated games, and evolutionary games.

This book, Advances in Economic Design, celebrates the birth of SED, the Society for Economic Design. It grew out of SED 2000, the first International Conference of the Society for Economic Design, which took place in istanbul during 23-27 lune, 2000. While it is not a proceedings or even a selected proceedings volume, it nevertheless contains many chapters which derive from papers presented at SED 2000, although they have typically been substantially reworked, extended and deepened. Of course, all the papers published in this book were anonymously refe­ reed. As a collection of selected essays, the book displays the state of the art across a broad spectrum of theoretical questions and topics and areas of application which economic designers are investigating. This characteristic of the book is reflected in its organization into seven parts: (A) Social Choice and Electoral Systems, (B) Buyers and SeIlers, (C) Bargaining, (D) Coalitional Stability and Efficiency, (E) Regulating and Organizing Markets, (F) Designing Rights, (G) Information. Most of the chapters of this book were edited for their English. Ms. ludith Tucker edited Chapters A2, A3, BI, B3, Cl, C4, DI, D2, D3, E2, E3, F2, F3 and F4, while Dr. Noah Hardy linguistically edited Chapters B2, B4 and C3. We thank Ms. Tucker and Dr. Hardy for their diligent support in this regard.

The theory of social choice deals with both the processes and results of col­ lective decision making. In this book, we explore some issues in the theory of social choice and mechanism design. We examine the premises of this theory, the axiomatic approach, and the mechanism design approach. The main questions are what is collective interest, how is it related to individuals' interests, how should one design social interactions, laws, and in­ stitutions? These questions are not new. Philosophers, social scientists have indeed pondered upon them for years. And, in fact, the organizational struc­ tures of many social institutions -courts, parliaments, committees and reg­ ulatory boards -often lack a sound theoretical base. This is not surprising, as it is, indeed, difficult to provide for a comprehensive formalization of the activities of such organizations. Nevertheless, there has been a definite trend towards providing clear and unambiguous rules for collective decision mak­ ing. These very rules constitute the body of social choice theory and its main object. The basic problem of social choice We explain here more precisely what a problem of social choice is, what approaches might be used to tackle it, and what kind of solutions it leads to. We introduce a few basic notions in preliminarily fashion and, in doing so, we stress both motivations and explanations.

When Murat Sertel asked us whether we would be interested in organizing a special issue of the Review of Economic Design on the formation of networks and groups, we were happy to accept because of the growing research on this important topic. We were also pleasantly surprised at the response to our request for submissions to the special issue, receiving a much larger number of sub­ missions than we had anticipated. In the end we were able to put together two special issues of insightful papers on this topic. Given the growing interest in this topic, we also decided (with encouragement from Murat) to combine the special issues in the form of a book for wider dissemination. However, once we had decided to edit the book, it was natural to move beyond the special issue to include at least some of the papers that have been influential in the literature on the formation of networks. These papers were published in other journals, and we are very grateful to the authors as well as the journals for permission to include these papers in the book.