Title: Quota Mechanisms: Limitations and Robustness (with Deniz Kattwinkel).

Abstract: Quota mechanisms are commonly used within organizations to elicit private information when agents face multiple decisions and monetary transfers are infeasible. As the number of decisions grows large, quotas asymptotically implement the same set of social choice rules as do monetary transfers. We analyze the robustness of quota mechanisms to misspecified beliefs. To set the correct quota, the designer must have precise knowledge of the environment. We show that only trivial social choice rules can be implemented by quota mechanisms in a prior-independent way. Next, we bound the error that results when the quota does not match the true type distribution. Finally, we show that in a multi-agent setting, quotas are robust to misspecification of the agents' beliefs about each other. Crucially, the quota makes the distribution of reports common knowledge.