23,014 research outputs found
Mechanism Design when players' Preferences and information coincide
It is well known that when players have private information, vis a vis the designer, and their preferences coincide it is hard to implement the socially desirable outcome. We show that with arbitrarily small fines and arbitrarily noisy inspections, the social choice correspondence can be fully implemented (truth telling is the unique Nash equilibrium)
Mechanism Design when players' Preferences and information coincide
It is well known that when players have private information, vis a vis the designer, and their preferences coincide it is hard to implement the socially desirable outcome. We show that with arbitrarily small fines and arbitrarily noisy inspections, the social choice correspondence can be fully implemented (truth telling is the unique Nash equilibrium)
Knightian Auctions
We study single-good auctions in a setting where each player knows his own
valuation only within a constant multiplicative factor \delta{} in (0,1), and
the mechanism designer knows \delta. The classical notions of implementation in
dominant strategies and implementation in undominated strategies are naturally
extended to this setting, but their power is vastly different.
On the negative side, we prove that no dominant-strategy mechanism can
guarantee social welfare that is significantly better than that achievable by
assigning the good to a random player.
On the positive side, we provide tight upper and lower bounds for the
fraction of the maximum social welfare achievable in undominated strategies,
whether deterministically or probabilistically
Knightian Analysis of the Vickrey Mechanism
We analyze the Vickrey mechanism for auctions of multiple identical goods
when the players have both Knightian uncertainty over their own valuations and
incomplete preferences. In this model, the Vickrey mechanism is no longer
dominant-strategy, and we prove that all dominant-strategy mechanisms are
inadequate. However, we also prove that, in undominated strategies, the social
welfare produced by the Vickrey mechanism in the worst case is not only very
good, but also essentially optimal.Comment: To appear in Econometric
Committee Design in the Presence of Communication
The goal of this paper is to introduce communication in a collective choice environment with information acquisition. We concentrate on decision panels that are comprised of agents sharing a common goal and having a joint task. Members of the panel decide whether to acquire costly information or not, preceding the communication stage. We take a mechanism design approach and consider a designer who can choose the size of the decision panel, the procedure by which it selects the collective choice, and the communication protocol by which its members abide prior to casting their individual action choices. We characterize the solution of this extended design problem. We find that the optimal communication protocol in such an environment balances a tradeoff between inducing players to acquire information and extracting the maximal amount of information from them. In particular, the optimal device may lead to suboptimal aggregation of information from a statistical point of view. Furthermore, groups producing the optimal collective decisions are bounded in size. Comparative statics results shed light on the regularities the design solution exhibits. For example, the expected utility of all agents decreases with the cost of private information and increases with its accuracy, but the optimal panel size is not monotonic in the signals' accuracy.Communication, Collective Choice, Mechanism Design, Strategic Voting, Information Acquisition
Bidding for the Surplus: Realizing Efficient Outcomes in General Economic Environments
In this paper, we consider two classes of economic environments. In the first type, agents are faced with the task of providing local public goods that will benefit some or all of them. In the second type, economic activity takes place via formation of links. Agents need both to both form a network and decide how to share the output generated. For both scenarios, we suggest a bidding mechanism whereby agents bid for the right to decide upon the organization of the economic activity. The subgame perfect equilibria of this game generate efficient outcomes.Bidding, Implementation, Networks, Public goods
Information in Mechanism Design
We survey the recent literature on the role of information for mechanism design. We specifically consider the role of endogeneity of and robustness to private information in mechanism design. We view information acquisition of and robustness to private information as two distinct but related aspects of information management important in many design settings. We review the existing literature and point out directions for additional future work.Mechanism Design, Information Acquisition, Ex Post Equilibrium, Robust Mechanism Design, Interdependent Values, Information Management
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