Author: Aleksei Suzdaltsev
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Languages : en
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In this thesis, we propose solutions to three problems in the area of robust mechanism design. The first two problems concern revenue maximization by a seller facing several potential buyers whose knowledge of the probability distribution of buyers' valuations is scarce. The third problem concerns contracting under unknown production technology. More specifically: In Chapter 2 (first substantive chapter), we consider the following model. An indivisible object may be sold to one of n agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the values' distribution is limited: she knows only the means (which may be different) an upper bound for valuations. Valuations may be correlated. Using a constructive approach based on duality, we prove that a mechanism that maximizes the worst-case expected revenue among all deterministic dominant-strategy incentive compatible, ex post individually rational mechanisms takes the following form: (1) the bidders submit bids; (2) for each bidder, a bidder-specific linear function of the bid is calculated (we call it a ``linear score''); (3) the object is awarded to the agent with the highest score, provided it's nonnegative; (4) the winning bidder pays the minimal amount he would need to bid to still win in the auction. The set of optimal mechanisms includes other mechanisms but all those have to be close to the optimal linear score auction in a certain sense. When means are high, all optimal mechanisms share the linearity property. Second-price auction without a reserve is an optimal mechanism when the number of symmetric bidders is sufficiently high. In Chapter 3, we consider a related problem in which the valuations are constrained to be independent draws from a partially known distribution. The seller knows one or two moments of the distribution. We ask what would be a reserve-price in a second-price auction that maximizes worst-case expected revenue. Using a technique different from Chapter 2, we prove that it is always optimal to set the reserve price to seller's own valuation. However, the maxmin reserve price may not be unique. If the number of bidders is sufficiently high, all prices below the seller's valuation, including zero, are also optimal. In the final chapter, we seek a robust solution of a hidden-action, rather than a hidden-information problem. A principal is uncertain about a technology mapping an agent's effort to the distribution of output. The agent is risk neutral and there is a participation constraint but no limited liability constraint. Transfers can be costly. An example of this setting is the case where the principal is a society trying to properly incentivize a firm to carry out innovation. We first show that when the principal employs minimax-regret criterion in the face of the technological uncertainty, an optimal contract is affine. We then characterize the full set of optimal contracts. A contract is optimal if and only if it lies within certain affine, increasing bounds that collapse to a point when output reaches its maximum value.
Author: Wanchang Zhang
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Languages : en
Pages : 0
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This dissertation studies the robust design of institutions when the mechanism designer does not fully know the environment. In Chapter 1, I construct a novel random double auction as a robust bilateral trading mechanism for a profit-maximizing intermediary who facilitates trade between a buyer and a seller. It works as follows. The intermediary publicly commits to charging a fixed commission fee and randomly drawing a spread from a uniform distribution. Then the buyer submits a bid price and the seller submits an ask price simultaneously. If the difference between the bid price and the ask price is greater than the realized spread, then the asset is transacted at the midpoint price, and each pays the intermediary half of the fixed commission fee. Otherwise, no trade takes place, and no one pays or receives anything. I show that the random double auction is a dominant-strategy mechanism, always guarantees a positive profit, and maximizes the profit guarantee across all dominant-strategy mechanisms. In Chapter 2, I study the single-unit auction design when the seller is assumed to have information only about the marginal distribution of a generic bidder's valuation, but does not know the correlation structure of the joint distribution of bidders' valuations. For the two-bidder case, a second-price auction with uniformly distributed random reserve maximizes the worst-case expected revenue across all dominant-strategy mechanisms. For the N-bidder ( N ≥ 3 ) case, a second-price auction with Beta-distributed random reserve is a maxmin mechanism among standard (only a bidder with the highest bid could win the good) dominant-strategy mechanisms. In Chapter 3, I study the auction design of selling multiple goods when the seller only knows the upper bounds of bidders' values for each good and has no additional distributional information. The designer takes a minimax regret approach. The expected regret from a mechanism given a joint distribution over value profiles and an equilibrium is the difference between the full surplus and the expected revenue. I find that a separate second-price auction with random reserves minimizes her worst-case expected regret across all participation-securing Bayesian mechanisms.
Author: Weixin Chen (Researcher in microeconomic theory)
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Languages : en
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This thesis consists of three papers in mechanism design. Chapter 1 is based on a paper of mine entitled "Quality Disclosure and Price Discrimination". Chapter 2 is based on "Penalty, Voting, and Collusion: a Common Agency Approach to Industrial Regulation and Political Power". Chapter 3 is based on "Partitional Information Revelation under Renegotiation". A key framework in mechanism design is screening: a principal who designs the contract induces agents with private information to select certain action(s) or bundle(s). Classical results are second-best distortion and Myerson ironing, which are derived when the agency involves a single task (or tasks independent across agents), an agent's information is privately known by himself, and there is full commitment. Chapter 1 considers incentivizing tasks that are related through a resource constraint. It studies the second-degree price discrimination when the supply quality follows some exogenous distribution, or more specifically, the design of information and pricing in a monopolistic market with product quality dispersion. The main message is that optimality requires a partial disclosure, and finer results on the allocation distortion depend on the heterogeneity of the buyers' preference. When such preference over assignment, i.e., quality distribution, has a uni-dimensional sufficient statistics in the quality space, the optimal distortion resembles Myerson's ironing and the optimal disclosure takes a partitional form. For more general preference, the optimal distortion departs from Myerson's result. Chapter 2 considers eliciting signals informative of the agent's private information from multiple sources. An interesting case is by considering a voting committee as the principal, where voting aggregates welfare-relevant information but faces corruptive incentives. The key insights are that the optimal rule is a binary verdict, resembling the principle of maximum deterrence, and the corruptive incentives typically push the optimal voting rule towards unanimity. Chapter 3 considers commitment with renegotiation: the counterparties can stick to the previously signed long-term contract or revise it with mutual consent. More specifically, it studies a long-term relationship between a seller and a buyer whose valuation (for a per-period service or a rental good) is private. In such a dynamic game, a new dimension of mechanism design, namely intertemporal type separation, arises as its induced belief-updating affects the rent extraction--efficiency tradeoff. The main message is that all PBE share the following property in the progressive screening process: at each history, the seller partitions the posterior support into countable intervals and offers a pooling contract to each of these intervals.
Author: Pavel Andreyanov
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Languages : en
Pages : 169
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My dissertation contributes to the literature on prior-free (robust) mechanism design. Prior-freeness can be interpreted differently, but a common feature is that certain mechanisms can be ranked above the others without the exact knowledge of distributions and/or utilities. According to the Wilson critique, the knowledge of fine details of the setting such as distributions and utilities is an unrealistic assumption and, moreover, optimal mechanisms in the classic (Bayesian) sense are often too complex to be implemented in reality. In the first chapter I study a scoring auction and the welfare implications of switching between the two leading designs of the scoring rule: linear (``weighted bid'') and log-linear (``adjusted bid''), when the designer's preferences for quality and money are unknown. Motivated by the empirical application, I formulate a new model of scoring auctions, with two key elements: exogenous quality and a reserve price, and characterize the equilibrium for a rich set of scoring rules. The data is drawn from the Russian public procurement sector in which the linear scoring rule was applied from 2011 to 2013. I estimate the underlying distribution of firms' types nonparametrically and simulate the equilibria for both scoring rules with different weights. The empirical results show that for any log-linear scoring rule, there exists a linear one, yielding a higher expected quality and rebate. Hence, at least with risk-neutral preferences, the linear design is superior to the log-linear. In the second chapter (Co-authored with Jernej Copic and Byeong-hyeon Jeong, UCLA) I study robust allocation of a divisible public good among n agents with quasi-linear utilities, when the budget is exactly balanced. Under several additional assumptions, we prove that such mechanism is equivalent to a distribution over simple posted prices. A robustly optimal mechanism minimizes expected welfare loss among robust divisible ones. For any prior belief, I show that a simple posted prices is robustly optimal. This justifies a restriction to binary allocations commonly found in the mechanism design literature. Robustness comes at a high cost. For certain beliefs, we show that the expected welfare loss of an optimal posted price is as big as 1/2 of the expected welfare in the corresponding optimal Bayesian mechanism, independently of the size of the economy. This bound is tight for the special case of two agents. In the third chapter (Co-authored with Tomasz Sadzik, UCLA) I provide mechanisms for exchange economies with private information and interdependent values, which are ex-post individually rational, incentive compatible, generate budget surplus and are ex-post nearly efficient, when there are many agents. Our framework is entirely prior-free, and I make no symmetry restrictions. The mechanisms can be implemented using a novel discriminatory conditional double auction, without knowledge of information structure or utility functions. I also show that no other mechanism satisfying the constraints can generate inefficiency of smaller order.
Author: Alexander Rodivilov
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Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 109
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My dissertation investigates optimal contracts for experimentation and a matching problem for the runway slot allocation. The first chapter of my dissertation examines the role of monitoring in experimentation where agents may observe success privately. In the benchmark model without monitoring, private observability of success is inconsequential as the agent never wants to delay announcing success. However, with monitoring of the agent's effort, private observability of success plays a role in choosing the optimal time for monitoring. When success is observed publicly, the optimal time for a principal to hire a monitor is at the start of the relationship. On the contrary, if the agent observes success privately, and the discount factor is high enough, monitoring is performed during the final period. The second chapter discusses optimal contracts for both experimentation and production. It can be optimal to pay a rent after failure and over experimentation can be optimal. Over production can occur in the exploitation phase. The third chapter considers a financially significant matching problem that emerges when inclement weather conditions strike an airport and runway slots must be reallocated.
Author: Ilia Krasikov
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Languages : en
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The thesis focuses on understanding the dynamic nature of contracts used in various economic context, specifically financial economics and industrial organization. The first chapter "A Theory of Dynamic Contracting with Financial Constraints'' draws on a large empirical literature documenting that small businesses are financially constrained, and operate at an inefficient level. In the paper, we build a theoretical model where financial constraints arise endogenously as a product of interaction between persistent agency frictions and agent's inability to raise external capital.The paper makes two general points. First, efficiency is a certainty in the long run, and it is achieved through monotone slacking of financial constraints. Second, persistence makes the path towards efficiency much more constrained in comparison to the model with the iid technology. In particular, we show that dynamic agency models with persistence predict a larger cross section of firms in the economy to be financially constrained.At a technical level, we invoke the recursive approach of \citet{aps}, using a two-dimensional vector of promised utilities as a state variable. We show that the optimal contract always stays in a strict subset of the recursive domain termed the shell, and the optimal contract is monotone within this set. We also verify that the results continue to hold in continuous time.The second chapter "Dynamic Contracts with Unequal Discounting'' looks at dynamic screening with soft financial constraints. In contrast to the first paper, the agent can raise money but at a different rate than the principal.We solve for the optimal contract and show that efficiency is not attainable with soft financial constraints. Therefore, the predictions of dynamic models of mechanism design are not robust to the assumption of equal discounting. For the large set of parameters, the optimal contract has the restart property- dynamic distortions are a function of the number of consecutive bad shocks, and once the good shock arrives the process repeats again. We also show that restricting attention to contracts which have the restart property is in general approximately optimal. The endogenous resetting aspect of restart contracts shares features of various contracts used in practice.In the third chapter "On Dynamic Pricing'', we explore dynamic price discrimination, extending a canonical model of monopolistic screening to repeated sales, where a seller uses timing of purchases as a screening instrument. The importance of time as an instrument for price discrimination has been understood since Varian [1989].In the paper, we are aiming to provide a formal analysis of pricing strategies to discriminate amongst consumers based on the timing of information arrival and/or the timing of purchase.A seller repeatedly trades with a buyer. Buyer's valuations for the trade follow a renewal process; that is, they change infrequently at random dates. For the model with two periods, We show that selling the first period good for a spot price and selling the second period good by optioning a sequence of forwards is the optimal pricing strategy. Specifically, at the outset, the seller offers an American option which can be exercised in each of the two periods. Exercising the option grants the buyer with a forward- an obligation to purchase the second period good for a specific price, and a strike price- a right to buy (or not) the good in the second period after learning his value. The buyer with a high valuation exercises the option in the first period, whereas one with a low valuation waits until the second period and then takes a call.We extend the analysis to the general continuous time renewal processes and assess the performance of price discrimination based on American options on forwards:i.optioning forwards is shown to be the deterministic optimum for the sequential screening problem- when the seller makes a sale in a single fixed period;ii.optioning forwards is shown to be the exact optimum for the repeated sales problem in the restricted class of strongly monotone contracts- when allocative distortions are monotone in a whole vector of buyer's valuations;iii.the optimum for the repeated sales problem in the unrestricted class of contracts is shown to be backloaded and a theoretical bound is provided for the fraction of optimal revenue that can be extracted by optioning forwards.Finally, the construction of dynamic pricing mechanism and bounds is ported to study repeated auctions.
Author: Jin Kim
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Author: Tobias Oberpaul
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3947095112
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Compensation contracts have become ever more complex and individualized, particularly in the executive compensation domain, where increasingly diverse stakeholder demands and governance requirements have led to the inclusion of more and increasingly interrelated components into compensation contracts. Even the compensation of lower-level employees has become complex as firms individualize employee compensation and use many different rewards simultaneously. Research has examined elements of compensation in isolation but has attempted to avoid the complexities of compensation. This dissertation examines the consequences of compensation complexity and compensation design dispersion and contributes to a better understanding of compensation and its consequences for firms and employees. The first study examines how the complexity of executive compensation contracts affects firm performance. It finds that CEO compensation complexity negatively affects accounting, market, and ESG (i.e., environmental, social, and governance) metrics of firm performance and explores mechanisms that help explain the relationships. The second study examines the effect of compensation design dispersion within top management teams and its impact on executive turnover. The results show that compensation design dispersion affects executive turnover, both directly and in interaction with relative pay level. The third study addresses the role of compensation design dispersion in the development of procedural justice perceptions. Using two experiments, this study shows that compensation design dispersion causes lower procedural justice perceptions, which appears to be less problematic for participants with relatively easier to understand contracts. In summary, this dissertation provides a nuanced overview of complex compensation design and compensation design dispersion. The findings contribute to a better understanding of the effectiveness of compensation as an incentive and sorting tool for organizations, and of the implications of compensation design for the functioning of teams.
Author: Mingjun Xiao
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Languages : en
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Mechanism design theories have established basic framework in studying economic problems where agents have private information and behave in their own interests. This framework provides a workhorse for exploring how to implement social choice rules in general. One typical issue is to analyze the decision-making by a social planner or a designer who aims to achieve efficient outcomes that maximize the joint welfare of all agents. Not surprisingly, efficiency essentially requires that the designer know the agents' private information and then choose the corresponding socially optimal outcome. However, the difficulty of mechanism design problem is to characterize these incentive constraints where agents find it optimal to reveal their private information truthfully. Specifically, sufficiently rich private information could entail non-implementability of efficient social choice rules. To overcome this difficulty, this dissertation considers a class of semi-exclusive information structures where agents may observe signals about payoff signals, and a class of problems where agents may have wrong beliefs or the mechanism designer is not informed about the agents' valuation functions, and proposes mechanisms that implement efficient allocations.
Author: Ritesh Jain (Ph. D. in economics)
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Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 119
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In Chapter 2 titled "Symmetric Mechanism Design," (Jointly with Yaron Azrieli) we study the extent to which regulators can guarantee fair outcomes by a policy requiring mechanisms to treat agents symmetrically. This is an exercise in mechanism design. Our main result is a characterization of the class of social choice functions that can be implemented under this constraint. In many environments, extremely discriminatory social choice functions can be implemented by symmetric mechanisms, but there are also cases in which symmetry is binding. Our characterization is based on a `revelation principle' type of result, where we show that a social choice function can be symmetrically implemented if and only if a particular kind of (indirect) symmetric mechanism implements it. We illustrate the result in environments of voting with private values, voting with a common value, and assignment of indivisible goods.
