As more companies pursue "open innovation" and adopt social networking and Web 2.0 tools, there is an emerging opportunity for them to connect with a diverse body of stakeholders and incorporate their interests and ideas. However, this also introduces many new challenges. The author identifies key properties that such networking mechanisms must satisfy if they are to succeed. He introduces a simple framework based on two dimensions of choices for designing such mechanisms: how the stakeholders are motivated to participate and how the company uses their inputs and makes decisions. For any choice, there are trade-offs to be considered. The author concludes by identifying the design that is most likely to succeed in fundamentally advancing the state-of-the-art of stakeholder marketing. Examples of many pioneering companies, such as Starbucks, Dell, Staples, Muji, and several others, are included in the discussion to illustrate the key propositions presented.

The House and Senate of the United States Congress recently passed legislation that directs the FCC to establish a system for using auctions to allocate the use of radio spectrum for personal communications services. There is a unique and unprecedented set of issues that arise in this context, which are of interest to economists, industry analysts, regulators, and policymakers. We discuss these issues and evaluate their likely impact on the outcome of the spectrum auctions. In addition, we argue that there may be pitfalls in the auction procedure adopted by the FCC, and we discuss possible alternative procedures.

No abstract

We address the following question: given a domain of asymmetric information economies, is it always possible to design a mechanism so that all of its equilibrium outcomes are either interim individually rational-efficient or interim envy-free-efficient in the domain? We show that if the solution concept were that of Bayesian equilibrium, the answer is no.It is known that in complete information economies such games can always be constructed.Can this gap be filled by "mechanisms with no regret" : games that leak information endogenously without enlarging the equilibrium set.We adopt two approaches. First, we introduce a theory of "cheap play". This is a natural model of mechanisms with no regret. Regret-free cheap play is shown to be characterized by posterior implement ability (Green and Laffont (1987)).The second is an extreme approach characterized by an ex post viewpoint (as in Cremer and McLean (1985)).Both approaches yield an impossibility result.Information leakage does not recover efficiency.