Collaborative Research: Robust Predictions In Games With Private Information

在许多经济环境中，参与者对其处境的相关方面没有相同的信息。 例如，在金融市场中，每个投资者可能对资产或公司的潜在价值有不同的信息。 在产品市场中，每个竞争企业都可能拥有关于其成本结构的私人信息。 在拍卖中，例如由联邦通信委员会组织的无线频谱拍卖或由美国内政部拍卖的海上石油区块，投标人拥有关于其估值的私人信息，以及关于其竞争对手的估值的一些可能是嘈杂的信息。代理人的私人信息，无论是关于他/她自己的估价还是竞争代理人的估价将决定代理人的行为和策略。 但在实践中，理论和/或经验分析师并不清楚经济行为人知道什么，特别是他们知道或不知道对方。 从政策的角度来看，缺失和不完整的信息也是非常相关的，因为许多市场的监督或监管机构都面临着类似的信息约束。PI开发了一些方法，可以预测经济主体的行为以及在这种情况下的市场分配。 这些预测是强大的一个大类的私人信息结构的代理。 它们确定了相互作用的性质和市场的条件，在这些条件下，有可能对经济行为做出独特的预测。 当这些条件不满足时，PI建立了可能的经济结果分布的鲁棒边界，特别是结果的均值和方差。 他们使用这些界限来预测市场中信息共享的福利影响。 他们还使用边界来设计鲁棒的机制，如拍卖和投票方法，在许多信息环境中表现良好。这个项目提供了一个经济理论，可以导致实际解决市场和机制设计问题。 它也为计量经济学未来的工作提供了理论基础，目的是在研究者不知道市场信息结构的情况下测试模型。这项研究将对使用博弈论作为基本工具的社会科学的许多不同领域产生更广泛的影响。 此外，该项目还对反托拉斯政策产生直接影响，因为是否允许卖方分享信息是价格操纵政策的一个问题。

In many economic environments the participants do not have the same information about the relevant aspects of their situation. For example, in a financial market each investor may have different pieces of information about the underlying value of an asset or a company. In product markets, each competiting firm may have private information about its cost structure. In auctions, such as the wireless spectrum auctions organized by the Federal Communications Commission or the offshore oil tracts auctioned off by the U.S. Department of the Interior, the bidders have private information about their valuations and also some, possibly noisy, information about the valuations of their competitors.The private information of an agent, whether it is about his/her own valuations or the valuations of the competing agents will determine the behavior and the strategy of the agent. But in practice, the theoretical and/or empirical analysts do not have a clear understanding of what the economic agents know and, in particular, what they do or do not know about each other. The missing and incomplete information si also highly relevant from a policy perspective as the supervising or regulatory authority in many markets face similar informational constraints.The PIs develop methods that allow predictions about the behavior of economic agents and the reulting market allocations in such settings. These predictions are robust to a large class of private information structures by the agents. They identify conditions on the nature of the interaction and the market under which it is possible to make unique predictions about economic behavior. When these conditions are not met, the PIs establish robust bounds on the distribution of possible economic outcomes, especially the mean and the variance of the outcomes. They use these bounds to predict the welfare impact of information sharing in markets. They also use the bounds to design robust mechanisms, such as auction and voting methods, that perform well in many information environments.This project provides an economic theory that can lead to practical solutions to market and mechanism design problems. It also provides a theoretical foundation for future work in econometrics aimed at testing models in situations where the researcher does not know the market's information structure.This research will have broader impacts for the many different areas of social science that use game theory as a fundamental tool. In addition, the project has direct implications for antitrust policy, since whether or not to allow sellers to share information is a question for price-fixing policy.