The crisis of welfare public expenditure, in particular at local level, calls for a fresh rethinking on the way money is used for services and distributed to families and individuals for welfare subsidies and aid, both by the public sector and by private charities, grant-makers and benevolent funds. When talking about welfare policies or benevolent and charitable activities, sometimes limited attention is given to players’ behavior in this context, to the incentives that lead their choices, to distribution of information and consequent strategies. Nonetheless, Game Theory and Mechanism Design Theory provided very interesting theoretical contributions that might suggest useful practical hints if adapted to each context. The course intends to offer a popular introduction to Game Theory, Information Theory and Mechanism Design Theory, and on possible fall-outs on aid-giving and charitable activities, with concrete examples on the relations between donors and beneficiaries. Mechanism Design theory has already found fruitful application in policy-making: some examples can be discovered in the fields of auctions, utility regulation, environmental policies, development policies in poor countries. On the contrary, it is applied to the welfare sector still in a limited way, despite the fact that where institutions are set with the official mission to help poor and vulnerable people, such institutional goal could distort organization/individual incentives, triggering opportunistic behavior from the applicant side.  A particular example of a mechanism to design conditional schemes in which benefits are related to virtuous behavior is provided by asset building and Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) experiences. Policies combining cash transfer to poor families, neediest individuals or students with asset building choices like personal investments in good practices (education, school attendance, preventive health, saving) are spreading in the developing world but still scattered in OECD countries.  Yet outcomes of experiments on behavioural drivers could give new insights into local policies with the careful analysis of micro incentives and possible design for better policies. In this context, the second part of the course aims to give participants a fresh overview of the main available instruments to design a conditional cash transfer (CCT) policy at local level alongside with deep insight from a limited set of international case studies.