研讨论文

《An Introduction to the Theory of Mechanism Design》by Timan Borgers Chapter 4

主讲人

龚雅娴（中央财经大学经济学院副教授）

内容简介

In this chapter we revisit the examples of the previous chapter, but we make much weaker assumptions about the agents’ and the mechanism designer’s beliefs. We assume that the mechanism designer does not want to rely on any assumption regarding the agents’ beliefs about each other. The mechanism designer in this chapter wishes to implement a mechanism of which he is sure that it produces the desired results independent of what agents think about each other. In a sense, we shall move from one extreme along a continuum of possible models to the other extreme, skipping whatever might be in the middle. While in the previous chapter the mechanism designer was willing to trust a single hypothesis about agents’ beliefs, in this chapter the mechanism designer is assumed to be uncertain about agents’ beliefs, and, moreover, it is assumed that the mechanism designer is not at all willing to risk making incorrect assumptions about agents’ beliefs.

We shall translate this into formal theory by requiring that the strategy combination that the mechanism designer proposes to the agents when presenting the mechanism to them prescribes choices that are optimal for each type, independent of what the other agents do. In short: Each type is required to have a dominant strategy.1 We shall refer to this requirement as “dominant strategy incentive compatibility.” This requirement restricts the set of mechanisms and strategy combinations that the mechanism designer can choose from. The available mechanisms and strategy combinations that we consider in this chapter are a strict subset of those considered in the previous chapter. This is because, obviously, a vector of strategies that prescribes a dominant strategy to each type always constitutes a Bayesian equilibrium of a game of incomplete information, but not vice versa.

时间

4月1日（18:20-20:00）

线下地址

学术会堂712

点评老师

张志祥、尹训东、史博文

活动对象

创新发展学院学生

人数规模

30人

主办单位

创新发展学院

撰稿：龚雅娴

审稿：尹训东

编辑：沈嘉怡

审核：王颖