12,401 research outputs found

    Nash Implementation in Production Economies with Unequal Skills: A Complete Characterization

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    In production economies with unequal labor skills, where the planner is ignorant to the set of feasible allocations in advance of production, the paper firstly introduces a new axiom, Nonmanipulability of Irrelevant Skills (NIS), which together with Maskin Monotonicity constitute the necessary and sufficient conditions for Nash implementation. Secondly, the paper defines natural mechanisms, and then fully characterizes Nash implementation by natural mechanisms, using a slightly stronger variation of NIS and Supporting Price Independence. Following these characterizations, it is shown that there is a Maskin monotonic allocation rule which is not implementable when information about individual skills is absent. In contrast, many fair allocation rules, which are known to be non-implementable in the present literature, are implementable by the natural mechanisms.Unequal labor skills, Nash implementation, Nonmanipulability of Irrelevant Skills

    Nash Implementation in Production Economies with Unequal Skills : A Complete Characterization

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    In production economies with unequal labor skills, one of the intrinsic features for Nash implementation problems is the lack of information about individual skills, which makes the planner ignorant to the set of feasible allocations in advance of production. Given this intrinsic feature, the paper firstly introduces a new axiom, Non-manipulability of Irrelevant Skills (NIS), which together with Maskin Monotonicity constitute the necessary and sufficient conditions for Nash implementation. Secondly, the paper defines some conditions for natural mechanisms which seem relevant, and then shows that any efficient allocation rule is Nashimplementable by the natural mechanisms if and only if it satisfies a slightly stronger variation of NIS and Supporting Price Independence. Following these characterizations, it is shown that there is a Maskin monotonic allocation rule which is not implementable when information about individual skills is absent. In contrast, there are many fair allocation rules which are known to be non-implementable in the present literature, but are implementable by the natural mechanisms given in this paper.Unequal labor skills, Nash implementation, Nonmanipulability of Irrelevant Skills

    Almost-dominant Strategy Implementation

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    Though some economic environments provide allocation rules that are implementable in dominant strategies (strategy-proof), a significant number of environments yield impossibility results. On the other hand, while there are quite general possibility results regarding implementation in Nash or Bayesian equilibrium, these equilibrium concepts make strong assumptions about the knowledge that players possess, or about the way they deal with uncertainty. As a compromise between these two notions, we propose a solution concept built on one premise: Players who do not have much to gain by manipulating an allocation rule will not bother to manipulate it. We search for efficient allocation rules for 2-agent exchange economies that never provide players with large gains from cheating. Though we show that such rules are very inequitable, we also show that some such rules are significantly more flexible than those that satisfy the stronger condition of strategy-proofness.Strategy-proof, almost dominant strategy

    Equilibrium Rejection of a Mechanism

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    We study a mechanism design problem in which players can take part in a mechanism to coordinate their actions in a default game. By refusing to participate in the mechanism, a player can revert to playing the default game non-cooperatively. We show with an example that some allocation rules are implementable only with mechanisms which will be rejected on the equilibrium path. In our construction, a refusal to participate conveys information about the types of the players. This information causes the default game to be played under different beliefs, and more importantly under different higher order beliefs, than the interim ones. We find a lower bound on all the implementable payoffs. We use this bound to establish a condition on the default game under which all the implementable outcomes are truthfully implementable, without the need to induce rejection of the mechanism.Mechanism design; Default game; Cartel agreements

    Beyond Binomial and Negative Binomial: Adaptation in Bernoulli Parameter Estimation

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    Estimating the parameter of a Bernoulli process arises in many applications, including photon-efficient active imaging where each illumination period is regarded as a single Bernoulli trial. Motivated by acquisition efficiency when multiple Bernoulli processes are of interest, we formulate the allocation of trials under a constraint on the mean as an optimal resource allocation problem. An oracle-aided trial allocation demonstrates that there can be a significant advantage from varying the allocation for different processes and inspires a simple trial allocation gain quantity. Motivated by realizing this gain without an oracle, we present a trellis-based framework for representing and optimizing stopping rules. Considering the convenient case of Beta priors, three implementable stopping rules with similar performances are explored, and the simplest of these is shown to asymptotically achieve the oracle-aided trial allocation. These approaches are further extended to estimating functions of a Bernoulli parameter. In simulations inspired by realistic active imaging scenarios, we demonstrate significant mean-squared error improvements: up to 4.36 dB for the estimation of p and up to 1.80 dB for the estimation of log p.Comment: 13 pages, 16 figure

    Beyond binomial and negative binomial: adaptation in Bernoulli parameter estimation

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    Estimating the parameter of a Bernoulli process arises in many applications, including photon-efficient active imaging where each illumination period is regarded as a single Bernoulli trial. Motivated by acquisition efficiency when multiple Bernoulli processes (e.g., multiple pixels) are of interest, we formulate the allocation of trials under a constraint on the mean as an optimal resource allocation problem. An oracle-aided trial allocation demonstrates that there can be a significant advantage from varying the allocation for different processes and inspires the introduction of a simple trial allocation gain quantity. Motivated by achieving this gain without an oracle, we present a trellis-based framework for representing and optimizing stopping rules. Considering the convenient case of Beta priors, three implementable stopping rules with similar performances are explored, and the simplest of these is shown to asymptotically achieve the oracle-aided trial allocation. These approaches are further extended to estimating functions of a Bernoulli parameter. In simulations inspired by realistic active imaging scenarios, we demonstrate significant mean-squared error improvements up to 4.36 dB for the estimation of p and up to 1.86 dB for the estimation of log p.https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.08801https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.08801First author draf

    Implementation with Incomplete Information in Exchange Economies

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    In this paper, we analyze the problem of designing incentive compatible mechanisms in pure exchange economic environments when agents have incomplete information. The equilibrium concept employed is Bayesian Nash equilibrium and the notion of implemantation is full implementation, which is stronger than the more commonly employed notion of truthful implementation. An allocation rule is truthfully implementable if there exists a direct mechanism to which truth telling is an equilibrium and which yields the allocation rule as its truthful equilibrium outcome. An allocation rule is fully implementable if there exists mechanism which yields the allocation rule as its unique equilibrium outcome. More generally, a set of allocation rules, or a social choice set, is fully implementable if there exist a mechanism whose equilibrium outcomes coincide with the set. This stronger notion of implemention avoids the well known problems of multiple equilibria which arise in direct revelation games. We develop a condition, termed Bayesian monotonicity, which we show is necessary for full implementation. An incentive compatibility condition is also necessary. We prove that Bayesian monotonicity and a slightly stronger incentive compatibility condition are sufficient for full implementation when there are at least three agents. We present several examples of allocation rules which do and do not satisfy our condition. One example is that of an allocation rule which is fully inplementable by an indirect mechanism, but for which every equivalent direct mechanism has multiple equilibrium outcomes

    Optimal Public Information Disclosure by Mechanism Designer

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    We consider a mechanism design environment where a principal can partially control agents' information before they play a mechanism (e.g., a seller disclosing quality information). Assuming that the principal can ex ante commit to his disclosure policy, this is a Bayesian persuasion problem with an endogenous payoff function as a consequence of optimal mechanism design. Wefirst show that, if the principal's and agents' information are independent or affiliated, and if the implementable set of (non-monetary) allocation rules is invariant to disclosure policies, then it is optimal for the principal to disclose all the relevant information. In case of negative correlation or in case the set of implementable allocation rules varies with disclosure policies, then full disclosure is not necessarily optimal. We then characterize the optimal (non-full) disclosure policy under additional assumptions, which, viewed as a Bayesian persuasion problem, provides a solution to a novel class of environments

    Characterization of revenue equivalence

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    The property of an allocation rule to be implementable in dominant strategies by a unique payment scheme is called \emph{revenue equivalence}. In this paper we give a characterization of revenue equivalence based on a graph theoretic interpretation of the incentive compatibility constraints. The characterization holds for any (possibly infinite) outcome space and many of the known results are immediate consequences. Moreover, revenue equivalence can be identified in cases where existing theorems are silent
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