Robust Market Design

过去三十年的机构设计文献是非常成功的。广泛的制度设计问题，从简单的交易规则到政治宪法，已经被分析并得到了优雅的最优解决方案。由于理论的新见解和信息技术的发展，市场设计在许多经济领域变得越来越重要。然而，在一般理论和应用/经验工作之间存在着不幸的脱节：在理论上起作用的机制或在某些机制类别中是最佳的机制往往过于复杂而无法在实践中使用。因此，从业者常常被引导去支持特别的限制，这种限制会导致更简单但显然不是最优的机制。pi将进行机制设计研究来回答这个问题。他们通过放松常识假设来建模鲁棒性考虑，从而内生地创建更强的解概念和更简单的机制作为鲁棒最优解。在项目的第一部分，他们考虑设计问题，其中设计师的目标是最大化预期收入，并包括最优垄断定价和最优拍卖。他们通过允许委托人对代理的信念和对其他代理类型的高阶信念不确定来引入鲁棒性考虑。随后，他们将通过要求估值的真实分布在模型分布的范围内来追求本地版本的稳健性分析。在第二部分，他们考虑全面实施而不是部分实施。由于私有信息可以使代理人以多种不同的方式协调行为，设计者担心代理人存在没有实现其目标的均衡行为。然后，稳健设计寻求防止平衡，以代理之间串通行为的形式，这不能实现设计者的目标。本研究对一类广泛的机构设计问题的鲁棒性概念进行了概念化。它提供了分析工具来评估设计规则对战略不确定性的敏感程度。如果成功，这些技术将为拍卖和其他分配规则等具体设计问题提供解决方案。机制设计理论越来越频繁地用于解决现实生活中的交易问题。因此，最重要的是了解理论解决方案对环境中的微小变化有多可靠。该项目的目标是加深我们对双边交易和拍卖规则等机制的理解。如果成功，所建议的技术和解决办法将有助于改进机制的性能，降低它们对环境具体特征的敏感性。

The mechanism design literature of the last thirty years has been very successful. A wide range of institutional design questions, ranging from simple trading rules to political constitutions, have been analyzed and elegant optimal solutions have been obtained. Market design has become more important in many economic arenas, both because of new insights from theory and developments in information technology. Yet there has been an unfortunate disconnect between the general theory and the applications/empirical work: mechanisms that work in theory or are optimal in some class of mechanisms often turn out to be too complicated to be used in practise. Practitioners have then often been led to argue in favor ad hoc restriction which lead to simpler but apparently sub-optimal mechanisms. The PIs will conduct research on mechanism design to answer this question. They model robustness considerations by relaxing common knowledge assumptions in such a way that stronger solution concepts and simpler mechanism are endogenously created as robust optimal solution. In the first part of the project they consider design problems in which the objective of the designer is to maximize expected revenues and encompasses optimal monopoly pricing and optimal auctions. They introduce robustness consideration by allowing the principal to be uncertain about agents' beliefs and higher order beliefs about other agents' types. Subsequently, they will pursue a local version of the robustness analysis by requiring that the true distribution over valuations is within a range of a model distribution. In the second part they consider full rather than partial implementation. As private information may enable the agents to coordinate behavior in many different ways, the designer is concerned that there exists equilibrium behavior by the agents which does not realize his objective. The robust design then seeks to prevent equilibria, in the form of collusive behavior among the agents, which fail to realize the objective of the designer. This research conceptualizes the notion of robustness for a wide class of mechanism design problems. It provides analytical instruments to evaluate how sensitive design rules are to strategic uncertainty. If successful, the techniques will provide solutions to specific design questions such as auctions and other allocation rules. The theory of mechanism design is used with increasing frequency to solve real-life trading problems. It is then of foremost interest to understand how robust the theoretical solutions are to small variations in the environment. The goal of this project is to deepen our understanding of the performance of mechanisms such as bilateral trading and auctions rules. If successful, the techniques and solutions suggested will lend themselves to improve the performance of mechanisms and decrease their sensitivity to the specific features of the environment.