Robust Mechanism Design

坚固的机构设计

• 批准号: 0095321
• 负责人: Stephen Morris
• 金额: $ 34.93万
• 依托单位: Yale University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2001
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2001-06-01 至 2004-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0095321&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Robust; Mechanism; Design

An important recent application of economic theory has been to the design of markets. For example, the design of the spectrum auctions in the United States and around the world has been much influenced by recent developments in auction theory and the theory of mechanism design. However, much of the theory has been developed with a simplified view of (1) how different market participants value the objects for sale; and (2) what they believe other market participants' beliefs. Such simplifying assumptions have been made for the sake of tractability and the resulting theories have been highly successful. However, one concern of practitioners and theorists alike has been that the "optimal" mechanisms derived from theory are sometimes too complex to be implemented in practice, which has lead for a search for simpler mechanisms that seem to be more robust to the underlying description of the environment. Our project will use new developments in game theory, allowing for richer "types" of market participants (including richer beliefs) to provide a theoretical justification for the use of simple mechanisms.The project addresses two separate but linked objectives. First, we examine how robust received mechanisms are to allowing the richer type spaces. In particular, researchers often argue that solution concepts stronger than Bayes-Nash equilibrium, such as dominance solvability and ex post equilibrium, are desirable because they are "robust," although the exact notion of robustness is not always described. One way of formalizing robustness is to examine whether results continue to hold on richer type spaces. In our proposal, we discuss various type spaces in between the naive type space and the universal type space, and examine how different mechanisms' performances vary as we vary the type space.Our second objective is to develop new optimal mechanisms for particular type spaces, intermediate between the standard space of all payoff-relevant types and the universal type space. Optimality in this context refers to the objective of the mechanism designer, which may coincide with social efficiency or simply be a revenue maximization problem for the designer. When the objective of the mechanism designer requires him to maximize an expected value, it will be appropriate to consider subspaces of the universal type space, which can be generated from a prior distribution function.

经济学理论最近的一个重要应用是市场设计。例如，美国和世界各地的频谱拍卖的设计受到拍卖理论和机制设计理论的最新发展的很大影响。然而，该理论的大部分内容都是以简化的观点发展起来的：（1）不同的市场参与者如何评估销售对象;（2）他们相信其他市场参与者的信念。这种简化的假设是为了便于处理，由此产生的理论非常成功。然而，实践者和理论家都关心的一个问题是，从理论中得出的“最佳”机制有时过于复杂，无法在实践中实施，这导致了寻找更简单的机制，似乎更强大的基础描述的环境。我们的项目将使用博弈论的新发展，允许更丰富的“类型”的市场参与者（包括更丰富的信念），为使用简单的机制提供理论依据。首先，我们研究如何强大的接收机制是允许更丰富的类型空间。特别是，研究人员经常认为比贝叶斯-纳什均衡更强的解决方案概念，如优势可解性和事后均衡，是可取的，因为它们是“鲁棒的”，尽管鲁棒性的确切概念并不总是描述。形式化健壮性的一种方法是检查结果是否继续保持在更丰富的类型空间上。在我们的方案中，我们讨论了介于朴素类型空间和通用类型空间之间的各种类型空间，并研究了不同机制的性能如何随着类型空间的变化而变化。我们的第二个目标是为特定的类型空间开发新的最优机制，该类型空间介于所有支付相关类型的标准空间和通用类型空间之间。在这种情况下，最优性是指机制设计者的目标，这可能与社会效率相一致，或者只是设计者的收入最大化问题。当机构设计者的目标要求他最大化期望值时，考虑通用类型空间的子空间是合适的，它可以从先验分布函数中生成。