Economics

This research will contribute to our understanding of how firms and workers allocate authority, and how this can be organized to increase productivity and reduce conflict. These questions go back to Ronald Coase and Herbert Simon, as well as the institutionalist school of labor economics. Outside of economics, our results will relate to the large literature in labor and legal history, sociology, and American political development that has concerned itself with the role of the law in the labor contract.

Economists who study how people make decisions have for many years started from the assumption that if an individual is faced with a choice between different alternatives, he or she can order the options from "most preferred" to "least preferred", as well as a number of other assumptions.

This award funds research in two different areas of economic theory. The first project develops a new method for understanding an important problem in mechanism design: how to assign an indivisible object to one person when several different people would benefit from owning or using the object. The research generalizes an existing theorem for implementing random assignments; the new generalized theorem applies to a broad range of circumstances and various practically important constraints.