Oscar Volij

We compare anonymous kidney donation with a mechanism that also permits conditional donations. Donors choose whether to donate and, if so, whether to use the anonymous or conditional channel. Conditional donation can increase participation but reduces matching flexibility and changes the composition of residual demand. We characterize equilibrium, which may be multiple, and derive conditions under which conditional donation shortens both groups' waiting lists. In fully sorted equilibria, we also identify when a higher prevalence of group-specific donor preferences in one group reduces both waiting lists.

We study beauty contest games without imposing the Gaussian information structures commonly used to obtain tractable equilibria. The unique equilibrium is characterized as the fixed point of a contraction operator, yielding a representation in terms of a hierarchy of higher-order expectations. For finite mixture signal structures, we show that this hierarchy admits a finite-dimensional representation and that equilibrium is linear in posterior beliefs, even when those beliefs are not affine in the signals. We also give conditions for the equilibrium strategies to be affine and monotone and use a uniform-binomial model to study the effects of public and private information on accuracy, dispersion, and expected losses.

Motivated by the literatures on the economics of the firm and organizations, we introduce frictions that create strategic interactions in teamwork in the Ricardian framework that studies the role of skills, tasks, and technology in labor markets. We find that the efficient outcome remains a Nash equilibrium under these frictions if and only if every worker in the team is deferential. Further, all the Nash equilibria can be classified by a chemistry index that captures the aggregate nature of the group of workers. When workers as a group are self-centered, the equilibrium is inefficient because there is incomplete division of labor, and because workers specialize in some tasks that they should not be performing. When workers as a group are deferential, there is a multiplicity of Nash equilibria some of which exhibit full division of labor. However, in almost all of the equilibria, workers specialize in certain tasks that they should not be performing, and furthermore, their effort allocation goes against the schedule of comparative advantages. We also study the Ricardian framework with social skills and obtain similar characterizations. The analysis also sheds light on the existence of managers and the scope of authority in organizations. In the conventional framework, managers play no part. However, managers may now assume a pivotal role in addressing teamwork frictions. Yet, their role arises only when every worker is deferential, since it is only in this case that the efficient outcome is a Nash equilibrium that could be reachable by a talented manager.

We say that a preference profile exhibits pairwise consensus around some fixed preference relation, if whenever a preference relation is closer to it than another one, the distance of the profile to the former is not greater than its distance to the latter. We say that a social choice rule satisfies the pairwise consensus property if it selects the top ranked alternative in the preference relation around which there is such a consensus. We show that the Borda rule is the unique scoring rule that satisfies this property.