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Virtual Implementation in Nash Equilibrium

Econometrica 1991 59(4), 997
Consider a social choice correspondence as a mapping from preference profiles to lotteries over some finite set of alternatives. A virtually implementable social choice function in Nash equilibrium is defined, under mild domain restrictions it is shown that in societies with at least three individuals all social choice correspondences are virtually implementable in Nash equilibrium. This contrasts with Maskin's classic characterization, which requires monotonicity as a necessary condition for exact implementation in Nash equilibrium. The two person case is considered seperately. While not all two-person social choice functions are virtually implementable, our necessary and sufficient condition is simple, which contrasts with the complex necessary and sufficient conditions for exact implementation.

Separable Preferences, Strategyproofness, and Decomposability

Econometrica 1999 67(3), 605-628
We consider strategyproof social choice functions defined over product domains. If preferences are strict orderings and separable, then strategyproof social choice functions must be decomposable provided that the domain of preferences is rich. We provide several characterization results in the case where preferences are separable only with respect to the elements of some partition of the set of components and these partitions vary across individuals. We characterize the libertarian social choice function and show that no superset of the tops separable domain admits strategyproof nondictatorial social choice functions.

Ordinally Bayesian Incentive Compatible Voting Rules

Econometrica 2004 72(2), 523-540
We study strategic voting after weakening the notion of strategy-proofness to Ordinal Bayesian Incentive Compatibility (OBIC). Under OBIC, truth-telling is required to maximize the expected utility of every voter, expected utility being computed with respect to the voter's prior beliefs and under the assumption that everybody else is also telling the truth. We show that for a special type of priors, i.e., the uniform priors, there exists a large class of social choice functions that are OBIC. However, for priors that are generic in the set of independent beliefs, a social choice function is OBIC only if it is dictatorial. This result underlines the robustness of the Gibbard–Satterthwaite Theorem.

Weak Monotonicity Characterizes Deterministic Dominant-Strategy Implementation

Econometrica 2006 74(4), 1109-1132 open access
We characterize dominant-strategy incentive compatibility with multidimensional types. A deterministic social choice function is dominant-strategy incentive compatible if and only if it is weakly monotone (W-Mon). The W-Mon requirement is the following: If changing one agent's type (while keeping the types of other agents fixed) changes the outcome under the social choice function, then the resulting difference in utilities of the new and original outcomes evaluated at the new type of this agent must be no less than this difference in utilities evaluated at the original type of this agent.