156,046 research outputs found
Mechanism Design with Moral Bidders
A rapidly growing literature on lying in behavioral economics and psychology
shows that individuals often do not lie even when lying maximizes their
utility. In this work, we attempt to incorporate these findings into the theory
of mechanism design. We consider players that have a preference for
truth-telling and will only lie if their benefit from lying is sufficiently
larger than the loss of the others. To accommodate such players, we introduce
-moral mechanisms, in which the gain of a player from misreporting his
true value, comparing to truth-telling, is at most times the loss that
the others incur due to misreporting.
We develop a theory of moral mechanisms in the canonical setting of
single-item auctions. We identify similarities and disparities to the standard
theory of truthful mechanisms. In particular, we show that the allocation
function does not uniquely determine the payments and is unlikely to admit a
simple characterization. In contrast, recall that monotonicity characterizes
the allocation function of truthful mechanisms.
Our main technical effort is invested in determining whether the auctioneer
can exploit the preference for truth-telling of the players to extract more
revenue comparing to truthful mechanisms. We show that the auctioneer can
extract more revenue when the values of the players are correlated, even when
there are only two players. However, we show that truthful mechanisms are
revenue-maximizing even among moral ones when the values of the players are
independently drawn from certain identical distributions. As a by product we
get an alternative proof to Myerson's characterization in the settings that we
consider. We flesh out this approach by providing an alternative proof to
Myerson's characterization that does not involve moral mechanisms whenever the
values are independently drawn from regular distributions
A Semantic Approach to the Completeness Problem in Quantum Mechanics
The old Bohr-Einstein debate about the completeness of quantum mechanics (QM)
was held on an ontological ground. The completeness problem becomes more
tractable, however, if it is preliminarily discussed from a semantic viewpoint.
Indeed every physical theory adopts, explicitly or not, a truth theory for its
observative language, in terms of which the notions of semantic objectivity and
semantic completeness of the physical theory can be introduced and inquired. In
particular, standard QM adopts a verificationist theory of truth that implies
its semantic nonobjectivity; moreover, we show in this paper that standard QM
is semantically complete, which matches Bohr's thesis. On the other hand, one
of the authors has provided a Semantic Realism (or SR) interpretation of QM
that adopts a Tarskian theory of truth as correspondence for the observative
language of QM (which was previously mantained to be impossible); according to
this interpretation QM is semantically objective, yet incomplete, which matches
EPR's thesis. Thus, standard QM and the SR interpretation of QM come to
opposite conclusions. These can be reconciled within an integrationist
perspective that interpretes non-Tarskian theories of truth as theories of
metalinguistic concepts different from truth.Comment: 19 pages. Further revision. Proof of Theorem 3.2.1 simplified,
Section 3.5 amended, minor changes in several sections. Accepted for
publication in Foundations of Physic
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