Contingent Payment Mechanisms for Future Coordination

My research focuses on mechanism design for coordination when assigning resources or tasks to agents, when choosing a plan for a future event, in the presence of uncertainty, self-interest and private information. At the time of planning, each agent has uncertainty in her value in utilizing the resources, completing the tasks or attending the event at each specific times. The uncertainty would later be resolved in a future period, based on which agents decides on which actions to take. The design objective is to determine assignments, plans and also payments that may be contingent on the actions taken, in order to incentivize good outcomes. My past research include resource allocation to maximize utilization, incentivizing reliability demand side response in electric power systems, and possibilities of non-dictatorial mechanisms for the non-quasi-linear social choice problem. Looking forward, many challenges remain for the design and implementation of coordination mechanisms, including better understanding mechanism design with non-quasi-linear utilities, designing simple indirect mechanisms, exploring the effects of temporal preferences and present-bias, and experimenting to study human decisions on uncertain future events.