Advances in economic design

This book, Advances in Economic Design, celebrates the birth of SED, the Society for Economic Design. It grew out of SED 2000, the first International Conference of the Society for Economic Design, which took place in istanbul during 23-27 lune, 2000. While it is not a proceedings or even a selected proceedings volume, it nevertheless contains many chapters which derive from papers presented at SED 2000, although they have typically been substantially reworked, extended and deepened. Of course, all the papers published in this book were anonymously refe reed. As a collection of selected essays, the book displays the state of the art across a broad spectrum of theoretical questions and topics and areas of application which economic designers are investigating. This characteristic of the book is reflected in its organization into seven parts: (A) Social Choice and Electoral Systems, (B) Buyers and SeIlers, (C) Bargaining, (D) Coalitional Stability and Efficiency, (E) Regulating and Organizing Markets, (F) Designing Rights, (G) Information. Most of the chapters of this book were edited for their English. Ms. ludith Tucker edited Chapters A2, A3, BI, B3, Cl, C4, DI, D2, D3, E2, E3, F2, F3 and F4, while Dr. Noah Hardy linguistically edited Chapters B2, B4 and C3. We thank Ms. Tucker and Dr. Hardy for their diligent support in this regard.