Robust Market Design

在过去的三十年里，机构设计的文献非常成功。分析了从简单的交易规则到政治宪法的广泛的制度设计问题，并获得了优雅的最优解决方案。市场设计在许多经济领域变得更加重要，这既是因为来自理论的新见解，也是因为信息技术的发展。然而，令人遗憾的是，在一般理论和应用/经验工作之间出现了脱节：在理论上可行或在某类机制中是最优的机制往往被证明过于复杂，无法在实践中使用。然后，从业者经常会被引导去支持临时限制，这会导致更简单但显然不是最优的机制。私人投资促进局会就机制设计进行研究，以回答这个问题。他们通过放松常识假设来模拟健壮性考虑，这种方式使得更强的解概念和更简单的机制被内生地创建为健壮的最优解。在项目的第一部分，他们考虑了设计问题，其中设计者的目标是使预期收入最大化，并包括最优垄断定价和最优拍卖。它们通过允许委托人不确定代理的信念和关于其他代理类型的高阶信念来引入稳健性考虑。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，来追求稳健性分析的本地版本。在第二部分，他们考虑全面实施，而不是部分实施。由于私人信息可以使代理人以多种不同的方式协调行为，设计者担心代理人之间存在均衡行为，而不是实现他的目标。然后，健壮的设计试图防止以代理人之间串通行为的形式出现的均衡，这无法实现设计者的目标。这项研究为一大类机构设计问题概念化了健壮性的概念。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度。如果成功，这些技术将为拍卖和其他分配规则等特定设计问题提供解决方案。机制设计理论被越来越频繁地用于解决现实中的交易问题。因此，最重要的是了解理论解决方案对环境中的微小变化的健壮性。这个项目的目标是加深我们对双边贸易和拍卖规则等机制表现的理解。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，降低其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.