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Author: Yan Long
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Decision making
Languages : en
Pages : 71
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Book Description
Author: Yan Long
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Decision making
Languages : en
Pages : 71
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Wanchang Zhang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
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: Dirk Bergemann
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 981437458X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 471
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Foreword by Eric Maskin (Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2007)This volume brings together the collected contributions on the theme of robust mechanism design and robust implementation that Dirk Bergemann and Stephen Morris have been working on for the past decade. The collection is preceded by a comprehensive introductory essay, specifically written for this volume with the aim of providing the readers with an overview of the research agenda pursued in the collected papers.The introduction selectively presents the main results of the papers, and attempts to illustrate many of them in terms of a common and canonical example, namely a single unit auction with interdependent values. It is our hope that the use of this example facilitates the presentation of the results and that it brings the main insights within the context of an important economic mechanism, namely the generalized second price auction.
Author: Aleksei Suzdaltsev
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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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: Pavel Andreyanov
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
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: Dirk Bergemann
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781601986450
Category : Prices
Languages : en
Pages : 62
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Book Description
This essay provides an introduction to our recent work on robust mechanism design. The objective is to provide an overview of the research agenda and its results. We present the main results and illustrate many of them in terms of a common and canonical example, the single unit auction with interdependent values. In addition, we provide an extended discussion about the role of alternative assumptions about type spaces in our work, and the literature at large, in order to explain the common logic of the informational robustness approach that unifies the work.
Author: Gregory Pavlov
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 151
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In this dissertation we address several open problems in the theory of mechanism design: (i) optimal mechanism design when agents collude; (ii) multidimensional mechanism design problem of the multiproduct monopolist; (iii) robust predictions of the relative revenue loss from the bidders' collusion in the optimal auctions.
Author: Levent Ulku
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Econometrics
Languages : en
Pages : 71
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This dissertation consists of three essays in the theory of mechanism design under incomplete information. In the first essay, we analyze an implementation problem in which monetary transfers are feasible, valuations are interdependent and the set of available choices lies in a product space of lattices. This framework is general enough to subsume many interesting examples, including allocation problems with multiple objects. We identify a class of social choice rules which can be implemented in ex post equilibrium. We identify conditions under which ex post efficient social choice rules are implementable using monotone selection theory. The key conditions are extensions of the single crossing property and supermodularity. These conditions can be replaced with more tractable conditions in multiobject allocation problems with either two objects or two agents. I also show that the payments which implement monotone social decision rules coincide with the payments of (1) the classical Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism with private values, and (2) the generalized Vickrey auction introduced by Ausubel [1999] in multiunit allocation problems. The second essay generalizes the analysis of optimal (revenue maximizing) mechanism design for the seller of a single object introduced by Myerson [1981]. We consider a problem in which the seller has several heterogeneous objects and buyers' valuations depend on each other's private information. We analyze two nonnested environments in which incentive constraints can be replaced with more tractable monotonicity conditions. We establish conditions under which these monotonicity conditions can be ignored, and show that several earlier analyses of the optimal mechanism design problem can be unified and generalized. In particular, problems with two complementary goods in Levin [1997] and multiunit auction problems in Maskin and Riley [1989] and Branco [1996] are special cases. The third essay considers the problem of selling internet advertising slots to advertisers. Under suitable conditions, we solve for the payments imposed by an optimal mechanism and show that it can be decentralized via prices using a linear assignment approach. At every configuration of private information, optimal mechanism can be interpreted as a menu consisting of a price for every slot.
Author: Weixin Chen (Researcher in microeconomic theory)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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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: Daehyun Kim
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 153
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This dissertation studies how asymmetric information between economic agents interacts with their incentive in dynamic games and mechanism design. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 study this in mechanism design, especially focusing on robustness of mechanisms when a mechanism designer's knowledge on agents' belief and higher order beliefs is not perfect. In Chapter 1 we introduce a novel robustness notion into mechanism design, which we term confident implementation; and characterize confidently implementable social choice correspondences. In Chapter 2, we introduce another robust notion, p-dominant implementation where p [0, 1]N and N N is the number of agents, and fully characterize p-dominant implementable allocations in the quasilinear environment. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 are related in the following way: for some range of p, a p-dominant implementable social choice correspondence is confidently implementable. In Chapter 3, we study information disclosure problem to manage reputation. To study this, we consider a repeated game in which there are a long-run player and a stream of short-run players; and the long-run player has private information about her type, which is either commitment or normal. We assume that the shot-run player only can observe the past K N periods of information disclosed by the long-run player. In this environment, we characterize the information disclosure behavior of the long-run player and also equilibrium dynamics whose shape critically depends on the prior.
