Collaborative Research: Mechanism Design with Imperfect Commitment

调查人员将在不完全承诺的情况下进行机制设计研究。他们的工作将使用数学经济理论的工具来解决一个重要的现实世界问题。在许多决策和政策环境中，作出决策的个人并不掌握所有相关信息。例如，通常会受到决策影响的人拥有的重要信息不能直接提供给决策人。在这种情况下，知情的人可能会有动机扭曲他们告诉不知情的决策者的事情，以扭曲最终结果，使其符合自己的利益。机制设计经济学使用博弈论的工具来探讨这种情况。它使用博弈论的工具来确定如何通过向参与者提供正确的激励来获得准确的信息。这一理论起源于对拍卖、税收和公共产品的研究，也被应用于货币经济学、发展经济学和劳动经济学。这一理论对经济学家向政策制定者提供的建议产生了重大影响，但它建立在一个关键假设之上：政策制定者必须能够承诺(或签约)提供承诺的激励措施。在实践中，这有时是困难的。一旦政策制定者掌握了准确的信息，他或她可能会选择违背他/她奖励诚实说真话的承诺。本研究项目的目的是扩展现有的理论，以准确地考虑“不完美承诺”这一问题。其结果将是一种可以应用于更广泛的现实世界政策决策的理论。

The investigators will conduct research on mechanism design with imperfect commitment. Their work will use the tools of mathematical economic theory to address an important real-world problem. In many decision and policy environments, the individual who makes a decision does not have all relevant information. For example, often the people who will be affected by a decision have important information that is not directly available to the person making the decision. In this case, the informed individuals may have an incentive to distort what they tell the uninformed decision-maker, in order to distort the eventual outcome towards their self-interest.Mechanism design economics uses tools from game theory to explore this situation. It uses tools from game theory to determine how accurate information can be elicited by providing participants with the right incentives. The theory originates in the study of auctions, taxation, and public goods, and it has also been applied to monetary economics, development economics, and labor economics. This theory has had a substantial impact on the advice economists provide to policy-makers, but it rests on a key assumption: the policy-maker must be able to commit to (or contract on) providing the promised incentives.In practice, this is sometimes difficult. Once the policy-maker has accurate information, he or she may choose to renege on his/her commitment to reward truthtelling. The goal of this research project is to extend the current theory to consider exactly this problem of "imperfect commitment". The result will be a theory that can be applied to a substantially wider range of real-world policy decisions.