In this dissertation auction formats are developed and discussed that focus on three specific economic environments. Regarding the impossibility results from mechanism design, the main task for the implementation of auction designs is to balance allocative efficiency and incentive compatibility – the main characteristics a mechanism should provide. Therefore, the dissertation investigates the limits of conceivable relaxations of allocative efficiency and incentive compatibility for complex settings such as double auctions, interdependent-valuation environments and electricity market designs. The overall aim is to carefully weigh up the advantages and disadvantages for either relaxing allocative efficiency or respectively incentive compatibility.

Ce mémoire traite de nouveaux principes de conception qui sont inspirés par le couplage de deux unités représentant les différentes structures mécaniques. Les critères de conception optimale et les types d'unités combinées sont différents. Cependant, toutes les tâches sont considérées dans le couplage de ces unités. L'examen critique présenté dans le premier chapitre est divisé en trois sections en raison de la nature des problèmes traités: les robots marcheurs, les compensateurs de gravité et les robots collaboratifs. Le deuxième chapitre traite du développement de robots marcheurs à actionneur unique, conçus par couplage de deux mécanismes ayant les fonctionnants de jambe. Basée sur l'algorithme génétique, la synthèse proposée permet d'assurer la reproduction de la trajectoire obtenue à partir de la marche humaine. Par l'ajustement des paramètres géométriques des unités conçues, il devient possible non seulement d'assurer une marche du robot à des pas variables, mais également de monter les escaliers. Ensuite la conception et la synthèse des équilibreurs pour les robots sont considérés. Un costume robotisé type exosquelette permettant d'aider aux personnes transportant des charges lourdes est examiné dans le chapitre suivant La conception proposée présente une symbiose d'un support rigide et léger et d'un système de câbles monté sur ce support. L'étude et l'optimisation statique et dynamique ont conduit aux tests sur un mannequin. Le dernier chapitre propose l'étude et 'optimisation d'un système couplé, comprenant un manipulateur équilibré à commande manuelle et un robot collaboratif. Le but d'une telle coopération est de manipuler de lourdes charges avec un cobot. / This thesis deals with the design principles, which arc based on the coupling of two mechanical structures. The criteria for optimal design and the types of combined units are different. However, all the tasks are considered in coupling of given mechanical units. The critical review given in the first chapter is divided into three sections due to the nature of the examined problems: legged walking robots, gravity compensators used in robots and collaborative robots. Chapter two deals with the development of single actuator walking robots designed by coupling of two mechanisms. Based on the Genetic Algorithm, the synthesis allows one to ensure the reproduction of prescribed points of the given trajectory obtained from the walking gait. By adjusting the geometric parameters of the designed units, it becomes possible not only to operate the robot at variable steps, but also to climb the stairs. The next chapter deals with the design and synthesis of gravity balancers. A robotic exosuit that can help people carrying heavy load is the subject of chapter four. The proposed exosuit presents a symbiosis of two systems: rigid lightweight support and cable system. Static and dynamic studies and optimization are considered. Experiments are also carried out on a mannequin test bench. The last chapter presents a coupled system including a hand-operated balanced manipulator and a collaborative robot. The aim of such a cooperation is to manipulate heavy payloads with less powerful robots. Dynamic analysis of the coupled system is perfonned and methods for reducing the oscillation of the HOBM at the final phase of the prescribed trajectories are proposed.

Resource sharing is a common collaborative strategy used in practice. It has the potential to create synergistic value and leads to higher system efficiency. However, realizing this synergistic value can be challenging given the prevalence of decentralization in practice, where individual operators manage resources based on their own benefits. Hence, optimizing a decentralized system requires understanding not only the optimal operational strategy in terms of the overall system efficiency, but also the implementation of the strategy through proper management of individual incentives. However, traditional network optimization approaches typically assume a centralized perspective. The classic game theory framework, on the other hand, addresses incentive issues of decentralized decision makers, but mainly takes a high-level, economic perspective that does not fully capture the operational complexity involved in optimizing systems with resource sharing. The purpose of this thesis is to bridge this gap between practice and theory by studying the design of tools to manage and optimize the operations in decentralized systems with resource sharing using approaches that combine optimization and game theory. In particular, we focus on decentralized network systems and analyze two research streams in two application domains: (i) implementation of environmental legislation, and (ii) managing collaborative transportation systems. These applications are characterized by their decentralized multi-stakeholder nature where the conflicts and tension between the heterogeneous individual perspectives make system management very challenging. The main methodology used in this thesis is to adopt game theory models where individual decisions are endogenized as the solutions to network optimization problems that reflect their incentives. Such an approach allows us to capture the connection between the operational features of the system (e.g., capacity configuration, network structure, synergy level from resource sharing) and the individual incentives thus the effectiveness of the management tools, which is a main research contribution of this thesis. In the first research stream, we consider designing effective, efficient and practical implementation of electronic waste take-back legislation based on the widely-adopted Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) concept that mandates the financial responsibility of post-use treatment of their products. Typical implementations of EPR are collective, and allocate the resulting operating cost to involved producers. In this thesis, we demonstrate the complexity of collective EPR implementation due to the tension among different stakeholder perspectives, based on a case analysis of the Washington implementation. We then perform analytical studies of the two prominent challenges identified in current implementations: (i) developing cost allocation mechanisms that induce the voluntary participation of all producers in a collective system, thus promoting implementation efficiency; and (ii) designing collective EPR so as to encourage environmentally-friendly product design, thus promoting implementation effectiveness. Specifically, we prescribe new cost allocation methods to address the first challenge, and demonstrate the practicality and economic impact of the results using implementation data from the state of Washington. We then analyze the tensions between design incentives, efficiency and the effectiveness of the cost allocation to induce voluntary participation under collective EPR implementation. We show there exists a tradeoff among the three dimensions, driven by the network effects inherent in a collective system. The main contribution of this research stream is to demonstrate how the implementation outcomes of an environmental policy is influenced by the way that the policy ``filters' through operational-level factors, and to propose novel and implementation mechanisms to achieve efficient and effective EPR implementation. Hence, our study has the potential to provide guidance for practice and influence policy-making. In the second research stream, motivated by the practice of transportation alliances, we focus on a decentralized network setting where the individual entities make independent decisions regarding the routing of their own demand and the management of their own capacity, driven by their own benefits. We study the use of market-based exchange mechanisms to motivate and regulate capacity sharing so as to achieve the optimal overall routing efficiency in a general multicommodity network. We focus on the design of capacity pricing strategies in the presence of several practical operational complexities, including multiple ownership of the same capacity, uncertainty in network specifications, and information asymmetry between the central coordinator and individual operators. Our study in this research stream produces two sets of results. First, we demonstrate the impact of the underlying network structure on the effectiveness of using market-based exchange mechanisms to coordinate resource sharing and to allocate the resulting synergistic benefit, and characterize the network properties that matter. Second, we propose efficient and effective pricing policies and other mechanism design strategies to address different operational complexities. Specifically, we develop duality-based pricing algorithms, and evaluate different pricing strategies such as commodity-based price discrimination, which is shown to have an advantage in coordinating networks under uncertainty.

<p>This dissertation studies coordination mechanism design for sustainable supply networks in a globalized environment, with the goal of achieving long-term profitability, environmental friendliness and social responsibility. We examine three different types of supply networks in detail.</p><p>The first network consists of one supplier and multiple retailers. The main issue is how to efficiently share a scarce resource, such as capacities for green technology, among all members with private information under dynamically changing environment. We design a shared surplus supply agreement among the members which can lead to both efficient private investments and efficient capacity allocation under unpredictable and unverifiable market conditions.</p><p>The second network is a serial supply chain. The source node provides critical raw material (like coffee cherries) for the entire chain and is typically located in an underdeveloped economy, the end node is a retailer serving consumer at a developed economy (like Starbucks Co.). We construct a dynamic supply agreement that takes into account the changing market and production conditions to ensure fair compensations so that the partners have the right incentives to work together to develop sustainable quality supply.</p><p>The third network is a stylized global production network of a multinational company consisting of a home plant and a foreign branch. The branch serves the foreign market but receives a key component from the home plant. The distinctive feature is that both facilities belong to the same company, governed by the headquarters, yet they each also have their own autonomies. We analyze the role of the headquarters in designing coordination mechanism to improve efficiency. We show the headquarters can delegate the coordination effort to the home plant, as long as it keeps veto power.</p> / Dissertation

My dissertation consists of empirical and theoretical essays on Microeconomic Theory and International Economics. The first chapter discusses the existence and characterization of a model that determines producer's optimal pricing and allocation rule as a preannounced markdown schedule. The mechanism focuses on pricing and operational implications of allotting scarce resources when customers are heterogeneous in their valuations and sensitivities towards availability of product. The proposed mechanism suggests that a carefully designed multistep markdown pricing could achieve optimal revenue when selling a single unit. However, to sell multiple units, monopolist should modify the implementation of markdown pricing by either hiding the number of available products or selling them via contingent contracts and upfront payments. In the second essay, we study the heterogeneity of finance and growth nexus across countries. Our paper contributes to the literature by investigating whether this impact differs across regions and types of economy. Using a rich dataset, cross-section and dynamic panel estimation results suggest that the beneficial effect of financial deepening on economic growth in fact displays measurable heterogeneity; it is generally smaller in oil exporting countries; in certain regions, such as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA); and in lower-income countries. Further analysis suggests that these differences might be driven by regulatory/supervisory characteristics and related to differing performance on financial access for a given level of depth. The third chapter analyzes contraction of exports in the aftermath of severe financial crises and tests for its heterogeneity across different industries and based on their credit conditions. It provides a theoretical framework to provide insight on why sectors are hit disproportionately during and in the aftermath of severe financial distresses, and confirms most of them with empirical estimations. The findings suggest that industries with greater reliance on outside financing and fewer shares of tangible assets experience greater contractions in export volumes in the years following a severe financial crisis. / text

How should we divide a good or set of goods among a set of agents? There are various constraints that we can consider. We consider two particular constraints. The first is fairness - how can we find fair allocations? The second is truthfulness - what if we do not know agents valuations for the goods being allocated? What if these valuations need to be elicited, and agents will misreport their valuations if it is beneficial? Can we design procedures that elicit agents' true valuations while preserving the quality of the allocation? We consider truthful and fair resource allocation procedures through a computational lens. We first study fair division of a heterogeneous, divisible good, colloquially known as the cake cutting problem. We depart from the existing literature and assume that agents have restricted valuations that can be succinctly communicated. We consider the problems of welfare-maximization, expressiveness, and truthfulness in cake cutting under this model. In the second part of this dissertation we consider truthfulness in settings where payments can be used to incentivize agents to truthfully reveal their private information. A mechanism asks agents to report their private preference information and computes an allocation and payments based on these reports. The mechanism design problem is to find incentive compatible mechanisms which incentivize agents to truthfully reveal their private information and simultaneously compute allocations with desirable properties. The traditional approach to mechanism design specifies mechanisms by hand and proves that certain desirable properties are satisfied. This limits the design space to mechanisms that can be written down and analyzed. We take a computational approach, giving computational procedures that produce mechanisms with desirable properties. Our first contribution designs a procedure that modifies heuristic branch and bound search and makes it usable as the allocation algorithm in an incentive compatible mechanism. Our second contribution draws a novel connection between incentive compatible mechanisms and machine learning. We use this connection to learn payment rules to pair with provided allocation rules. Our payment rules are not exactly incentive compatibility, but they minimize a measure of how much agents can gain by misreporting. / Engineering and Applied Sciences

Empirical and theoretical topics in applied microeconomics are discussed in this dissertation. The first essay identifies and measures managerial advantages from access to high-quality deals in venture capital investments. The underlying social network of Harvard Business School MBA venture capitalists and entrepreneurs is used to proxy availability of deal access. Random section assignment of HBS MBA graduates provides a key exogenous variation for identification. Being socially connected to peer venture capital firms and private equity seeking startups leads to more deal flow, larger asset under management and better performance in the inaugural funds of HBS-executive run venture capital firms. The second essay presents a two-stage model of competing ad auctions. Search engines attract users via Cournot-style competition. Meanwhile, each advertiser must pay a participation cost to use each ad platform. Advertiser entry strategies using symmetric Bayes-Nash equilibrium that lead to the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves outcome of the ad auctions are derived. Consistent with the model predictions, empirical evidence shows that multi-homing advertisers are larger than single-homing advertisers. Comparative statics on consumer choice parameters, quality, and user welfare are used to analyze the prospect of joining auctions to mitigate participation costs. The analysis provides conditions when such joins do and do not increase welfare. The third essay develops and computes a dynamic model of search in internet advertising. Micro-level browsing data from Microsoft's Bing.com (formerly known as Live.com) is used for structural estimations. The model predicts that users do not click on any ad with weak signals due to accumulating search cost and monotonicity of the value function. Rational search reveals a cascading pattern: the user clicks on a sufficiently high, highest-signal ad first, then moves on to the ad with the next highest conditionally expected probability of match once his assessment on the current ad degrades over time. The user exits when maximum assessment of likelihood of match over all ads is below a threshold value. The essay provides a novel approach to understanding rational herding behavior when product quality is only partially unraveled.

Submitted by Daniella Santos (daniella.santos@fgv.br) on 2008-11-18T13:35:45Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao_Luis _Saporta_2008.pdf: 714856 bytes, checksum: 6d539d601783deaee9d41dca8fdf4f62 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Antoanne Pontes(antoanne.pontes@fgv.br) on 2008-11-18T13:39:36Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao_Luis _Saporta_2008.pdf: 714856 bytes, checksum: 6d539d601783deaee9d41dca8fdf4f62 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2008-11-18T13:39:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao_Luis _Saporta_2008.pdf: 714856 bytes, checksum: 6d539d601783deaee9d41dca8fdf4f62 (MD5) / In this work, we study the role that the perception of law enforcement has in agents’ decisions to invade public areas and explore in a predatory way the forest within. We developed a microeconomic model of choice under uncertainties, in which farmers compare their payoff of invasion with their payoff of following the rules. The payoff of invasion is calculated from the gain/loss resulted of being caught or not in this process, weighed by the probability of each event, which is a function of the government spending in law enforcement institutions. Following this, we calculate the ideal amount of government spending in order to achieve the maximum yield in the agricultural sector, as deforestation results in more land, but also decreases the productivity of the sector. Then, we make an analysis of mechanism design and deforestation, deriving the best direct mechanism from a Nash Equilibrium in a complete information game. Finally, we describe the real mechanisms that the Brazilian government has to reduce deforestation, and propose the ways these mechanisms can be used in different regions of the Amazon. / Nesse trabalho, estudamos o papel que a percepção de impunidade tem sobre os agentes que escolhem invadir áreas públicas na Amazônia para explorar de forma predatória os recursos florestais e ocupar a terra. Para isso, foi desenvolvido um modelo microeconômico de escolha sob incerteza, em que os fazendeiros comparam os payoffs provenientes da invasão ou de seguir a lei. O payoff da invasão foi calculado do ganho/perda resultante de ser pego ou não no ato ilegal, pesando as probabilidades de cada um desses eventos ocorrer (que é função dos gastos do governo com fiscalização na região). Em seguida, foi calculado a quantidade ótima de gastos do governo em fiscalização, levando em conta um governo interessado em maximizar a produção agropecuária regional, já que, por um lado, o desmatamento resulta em maior disponibilidade de terra para o setor agropecuário, porém, por outro, diminui a produtividade dado seu impacto sobre a qualidade ambiental. Depois, fazemos uma analise sobre desenho de mecanismo e desmatamento, desenvolvendo o melhor mecanismo direto de um Equilíbrio de Nash no jogo de informação perfeita, para em seguida descrever as opções de mecanismos possíveis para o governo brasileiro lidar com o desmatamento na Amazônia.

Submitted by Caio Teles (caio_act@hotmail.com) on 2018-01-27T15:39:08Z No. of bitstreams: 1 1-Artigo.pdf: 1265188 bytes, checksum: 5a2471a2292fc15d7036ab038945b20a (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by GILSON ROCHA MIRANDA (gilson.miranda@fgv.br) on 2018-02-15T17:48:05Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 1-Artigo.pdf: 1265188 bytes, checksum: 5a2471a2292fc15d7036ab038945b20a (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-02-19T19:40:19Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 1-Artigo.pdf: 1265188 bytes, checksum: 5a2471a2292fc15d7036ab038945b20a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-08-14 / In this thesis, we use mechanism design approach in order to study economies in which optimal mechanism bears some resemblance to actual monetary system. More precisely, we study optimal monetary policy in models in which either: money is essential, or, money and bonds are coessential. In the first chapter, we study an optimal intervention in a model of outside money. Next, we extend the model to include bonds and interpret its role. Finaly, the last chapter we discuss the problems with the usual modeling aproach to monetary policy transition and its implications

The diploma thesis deals with the construction design of reflective type of holographic microscope together with the proposal for the mechanical imposition of optical elements. Thesis contains parts where the illumination beam tracing through the optical system is calculated and discussed, followed up with the accuracy requirements for rectification mechanisms and their design. The three-dimensional model of modularly solved microscope is presented in conclusion of this thesis together with selected microscope sub-assemblies.