Three Essays in Public Mechanism Design PDF Download

Author: Jin Kim
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Author: Shuguang Zhu
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Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This thesis investigates several topics in Microeconomic Theory, with a focus on incorporating information control into mechanism design, checking the robustness of mechanisms, and providing a foundation for inconsistent collective decision-making. This work helps to optimize information transmission and acquisition in organizational communications, advertisement and policy design. It also sheds light on how inconsistent group decisions derive from heterogeneity in group members, and proposes ways to restore efficiency. The thesis consists of three chapters, each of which is self-contained and can be read separately. The first chapter studies a mechanism design environment where the principal has control over the agents' information about a payoff-relevant state. The principal commits to an information disclosure policy where each agent observes a private signal, while the principal directly observes neither the true state nor the signal profile. Examples include (1) assessing whether a new product matches consumers' preferences through their feedback on sample product trials, and (2) gathering intelligence by authorizing investigators to collect various aspects of information. I establish optimality of individually uninformative and aggregately revealing disclosure policy, where (i) each agent obtains no new information about the state after observing any realization of his own signal, but (ii) the principal can nevertheless infer the true state from the agents' reports about their signals. Furthermore, this optimal disclosure policy admits simple and intuitive implementation (such as certain types of blinded experiments, or restrictions on access to certain information) under additional assumptions. If attention is restricted to linear settings, I characterize a class of environments (including those satisfying the standard regularity conditions in mechanism design) where an equivalence result holds between private disclosure and public disclosure.The second chapter, co-authored with Takuro Yamashita, is motivated by Chung and Ely (2007), who establish maxmin and Bayesian foundations for dominant-strategy mechanisms in private-value auction environments. We first show that similar foundation results for ex post mechanisms hold true even with interdependent values if the interdependence is only cardinal. Conversely, if the environment exhibits ordinal interdependence, which is typically the case with multi-dimensional environments, then in general, ex post mechanisms do not have foundation. That is, there exists a non-ex-post mechanism that achieves strictly higher expected revenue than the optimal ex post mechanism, regardless of the agents' high-order beliefs. The third chapter shows that dynamic inconsistency in collective decision-making can derive from heterogeneity in group members' outside options (i.e. opportunity costs that individuals have to pay in order to join the group), even if individuals share the same exponentially discounting time preference. This model of endogenous dynamic inconsistency facilitatesthe analysis of welfare consequences, since time-consistent individual preferences allow for a well-defined measurement of social welfare. We further characterize the optimal Bayesian persuasion information disclosure policy, which takes the form of upper revealing rules, to alleviate the welfare distortion caused by inconsistent collective decisions. Our framework proves to be highly adaptable to various contexts, including provision of public facilities and assignment on team work.

Author: Guilherme Pereira de Freitas
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Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation contains three essays on mechanism design. The common goal of these essays is to assist in the solution of different resource allocation problems where asymmetric information creates obstacles to the efficient allocation of resources. In each essay, we present a mechanism that satisfactorily solves the resource allocation problem and study some of its properties. In our first essay, "Combinatorial Assignment under Dichotomous Preferences", we present a class of problems akin to time scheduling without a pre-existing time grid, and propose a mechanism that is efficient, strategy-proof and envy-free. Our second essay, "Monitoring Costs and the Management of Common-Pool Resources", studies what can happen to an existing mechanism - the individual tradable quotas (ITQ) mechanism, also known as the cap-and-trade mechanism - when quota enforcement is imperfect and costly. Our third essay, "Vessel Buyback", coauthored with John O. Ledyard, presents an auction design that can be used to buy back excess capital in overcapitalized industries.

Author: Anca Mihut
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Languages : en
Pages : 0

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The three essays presented in this thesis, concentrate on different areas of mechanism design that aim to address environmental issues related to permits markets, electricity consumption and water use. Using the advantages of a laboratory setting, this thesis aims to contribute to the ongoing debate regarding the appropriate mechanisms solutions for solving severalenvironmental issues related to the design of emission markets, the management of common pool resources and the impact of designing complex tariff mechanisms for acquiring a good. In the first essay, we use experimental emissions trading markets to investigate the effects of two types of instruments for dealing with the negative effects of price risk that results from the potential shocks that could affect production costs. As per the results obtained, the first mechanism that allows banking and borrowing permits from one period to another, yields some important benefits in terms of the reduction of price volatility and leading to overall flatter price series. The second instrument, besides allowing for permit transfer, also considers an adjustable supply of permits, such that besides managing to stabilize the price path, it also creates more significant results in terms of settling it around a desired target price level.In the second essay, we consider the dilemma that consumers are often faced with, when dealing with different tariff choices (mobile phone, electricity, train, airplane, gas etc.). It may be very complex to choose among these tariffs, notably because of the so-called cognitive biases that might distort consumers' perception. Typically, what should consumers choose between a simple tariff pricing and a more complex but also more advantageous non-linear tariff structure? We show that, in the lab, even when the more complex non-linear tariff structures are 50% more advantageous, in terms of gain expectancy, consumers constantly stick to the tariff with the most simple structure. Subjects are reluctant to choose pricing instruments containing a fixed cost and increasing block pricing structures.In the third essay, we examine cooperation in the context of a non-linear common pool resource game, in which individuals have unequal extraction capacities. We introduce two types of policy instruments in this environment. One instrument is based on two variants of a mechanism that taxes extraction and redistributes the tax revenue to group members. The other instrument varies the social observability of individual decisions. We find that both tax mechanisms reduce extraction, increase efficiency and reduce inequality within groups. In contrast, observability impacts only the Baseline condition by facilitating free-riding instead of creating a moral pressure on group members.

Author: Michael Gerald Smart
Publisher:
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Author: Weixin Chen (Researcher in microeconomic theory)
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Languages : en
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This thesis consists of three papers in mechanism design. Chapter 1 is based on a paper of mine entitled "Quality Disclosure and Price Discrimination". Chapter 2 is based on "Penalty, Voting, and Collusion: a Common Agency Approach to Industrial Regulation and Political Power". Chapter 3 is based on "Partitional Information Revelation under Renegotiation". A key framework in mechanism design is screening: a principal who designs the contract induces agents with private information to select certain action(s) or bundle(s). Classical results are second-best distortion and Myerson ironing, which are derived when the agency involves a single task (or tasks independent across agents), an agent's information is privately known by himself, and there is full commitment. Chapter 1 considers incentivizing tasks that are related through a resource constraint. It studies the second-degree price discrimination when the supply quality follows some exogenous distribution, or more specifically, the design of information and pricing in a monopolistic market with product quality dispersion. The main message is that optimality requires a partial disclosure, and finer results on the allocation distortion depend on the heterogeneity of the buyers' preference. When such preference over assignment, i.e., quality distribution, has a uni-dimensional sufficient statistics in the quality space, the optimal distortion resembles Myerson's ironing and the optimal disclosure takes a partitional form. For more general preference, the optimal distortion departs from Myerson's result. Chapter 2 considers eliciting signals informative of the agent's private information from multiple sources. An interesting case is by considering a voting committee as the principal, where voting aggregates welfare-relevant information but faces corruptive incentives. The key insights are that the optimal rule is a binary verdict, resembling the principle of maximum deterrence, and the corruptive incentives typically push the optimal voting rule towards unanimity. Chapter 3 considers commitment with renegotiation: the counterparties can stick to the previously signed long-term contract or revise it with mutual consent. More specifically, it studies a long-term relationship between a seller and a buyer whose valuation (for a per-period service or a rental good) is private. In such a dynamic game, a new dimension of mechanism design, namely intertemporal type separation, arises as its induced belief-updating affects the rent extraction--efficiency tradeoff. The main message is that all PBE share the following property in the progressive screening process: at each history, the seller partitions the posterior support into countable intervals and offers a pooling contract to each of these intervals.

Author: Martin Shubik
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262693110
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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This first volume in a three-volume exposition of Shubik's vision of "mathematical institutional economics" explores a one-period approach to economic exchange with money, debt, and bankruptcy. This is the first volume in a three-volume exposition of Martin Shubik's vision of "mathematical institutional economics"--a term he coined in 1959 to describe the theoretical underpinnings needed for the construction of an economic dynamics. The goal is to develop a process-oriented theory of money and financial institutions that reconciles micro- and macroeconomics, using as a prime tool the theory of games in strategic and extensive form. The approach involves a search for minimal financial institutions that appear as a logical, technological, and institutional necessity, as part of the "rules of the game." Money and financial institutions are assumed to be the basic elements of the network that transmits the sociopolitical imperatives to the economy. Volume 1 deals with a one-period approach to economic exchange with money, debt, and bankruptcy. Volume 2 explores the new economic features that arise when we consider multi-period finite and infinite horizon economies. Volume 3 will consider the specific role of financial institutions and government, and formulate the economic financial control problem linking micro- and macroeconomics.

Author: Yunan Li
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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In this thesis, I study mechanism design problems in environments where the information necessary to make decisions is affected by the actions of principal or agents.The first chapter considers the problem of a principal who must allocate a good among a finite number of agents, each of whom values the good. Each agent has private information about the principal's payoff if he receives the good. There are no monetary transfers. The principal can inspect agents' reports at a cost and punish them, but punishments are limited because verification is imperfect or information arrives only after the good has been allocated for a while. I characterize an optimal mechanism featuring two thresholds. Agents whose values are below the lower threshold and above the upper threshold are pooled, respectively. If the number of agents is small, then the pooling area at the top of value distribution disappears. If the number of agents is large, then the two pooling areas meet and the optimal mechanism can be implemented via a shortlisting procedure. The fact that the optimal mechanism depends on the number of agents implies that small and large organizations should behave differently. The second chapter considers the problem of a principal who wishes to distribute an indivisible good to a population of budget-constrained agents. Both valuation and budget are an agent's private information. The principal can inspect an agent's budget through a costly verification process and punish an agent who makes a false statement. I characterize the direct surplus-maximizing mechanism. This direct mechanism can be implemented by a two-stage mechanism in which agents only report their budgets. Specifically, all agents report their budgets in the first stage. The principal then provides budget-dependent cash subsidies to agents and assigns the goods randomly (with uniform probability) at budget-dependent prices. In the second stage, a resale market opens, but is regulated with budget-dependent sales taxes. Agents who report low budgets receive more subsidies in their initial purchases (the first stage), face higher taxes in the resale market (the second stage) and are inspected randomly. This implementation exhibits some of the features of some welfare programs, such as Singapore's housing and development board.The third chapter studies the design of ex-ante efficient mechanisms in situations where a single item is for sale, and agents have positively interdependent values and can covertly acquire information at a cost before participating in a mechanism. I find that when interdependency is low or the number of agents is large, the ex-post efficient mechanism is also ex-ante efficient. In cases of high interdependency or a small number of agents, ex-ante efficient mechanisms discourage agents from acquiring excessive information by introducing randomization to the ex-post efficient allocation rule in areas where the information's precision increases most rapidly.

Author:
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Languages : en
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This thesis consists of three self-contained essays on mechanism design problems: a collective decision problem, a theoretical auction problem, and an applied auction problem. Chapter 1 contains an introduction. In Chapter 2 I consider a problem where a group has to take a collective decision. I study how the decision mechanism should be designed when the information relevant for the decision is dispersed among the group members and when the group members' preferences over decisions might be in conflict. Observed mechanisms differ in whether the most extreme positions are disregarded or not. I find that the designer should never disregard the most extreme positions, but that he should limit the amount by which single group members can affect the decision. In Chapter 3 I analyze a seller's problem to design an optimal first-price auction. Normally the design problem reduces to the problem of determining the lowest admissible bid. I show that the structure of the optimal first-price auction may be non-standard when the seller cannot commit to sell to the highest bidder after observing the bids, and when he is able to fix the auction rules already at a time at which he is still uncertain about his own use value. In this case the seller might allow high and low bids, but forbid intermediate ones. In the last chapter I am interested in the problem of a procurer to organize his procurement process. I compare two procurement systems resembling stylized facts from American and Japanese procurement. In the first system the procurer exerts as much competitive pressure on his incumbent supplier as possible, while in the second system he protects his incumbent supplier by looking only for possible replacements after bilateral negotiations with him break down. I show that either system may induce higher relationship-specific investments and I describe under which conditions which of the two systems is preferable from the procurer's point of view.

Author: Aaron Luke Bodoh-Creed
Publisher:
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Languages : en
Pages :

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The focus of this dissertation is the role of information in the determination of market outcomes. The first essay provides a novel framework for studying large market mechanisms with an application to the information aggregation properties of uniform price auctions. The second essay analyzes a model of mood and associative memory and shows that this bias could explain anomalous results in the behavioral finance and organizational behavior literatures. The third and final essay analyzes ambiguity aversion and how it affects outcomes in general mechanisms. The first essay, "Mean Field Approximation of Large Games, " provides a general framework for approximating the equilibria of games with many participants using analytically tractable nonatomic limit games. We prove that if the game is continuous, then the set of equilibria is upper hemicontinuous in the number of agents. This implies that we can use equilibrium strategies of the limit game as an approximation of the equilibrium actions of the agents in the large finite game. We argue that this continuity property implies that generic large, continuous markets are almost competitive in the limit. We use our framework to analyze multi-unit demand uniform price auctions with both a common value component and bidders who value successive units as complements. We show that these auctions fully reveal the state of the world asymptotically and result in ex post efficient allocations with arbitrarily high probability in the asymptotic limit. As a second application, we provide a framework for approximating large stochastic games using dynamic competitive equilibria with applications to macroeconomics, industrial organization, engineering and computer science. The second essay, "Mood and Associative Memory, " examines the biases in memory caused by an agent's affective state. Within the psychology literature, it is a well established fact that decision makers in a positive emotional state are optimistic about the odds of positive random events and agents in a negative emotional state are pessimistic. By building a mathematical model firmly grounded on psychological primitives, we develop a behavioral decision theory framework that can be utilized in a wide range of microeconomic models. We apply our model to study employee morale and clarify a severely conflicted literature on morale within the Organizational Behavior literature. We also show that biases in memory are a potential explanation for a wide range of asset pricing anomalies such as excess volatility, short run underreaction and long run overreaction to news, and the influence of non-fundamental events. Our model provides a tool for policy makers to analyze the effects of biases in memory on the response of agents to firms, markets, and government policies and can be used to identify situations in which either public or private intervention may be required to ameliorate the effects of the agents' errors in judgment. The third and final essay, "Ambiguous Beliefs and Mechanism Design, " explores the effects of ambiguity aversion, also known as Knightian Uncertainty, on mechanism design theory. Knightian uncertainty refers to risk within the economy that is not characterized by a stochastic process commonly known to the agents. Compelling psychological data, such as the classical Ellsberg Paradox, have shown that agents reveal a strong aversion to Knightian Uncertainty above and beyond the risk aversion considered in neoclassical microeconomic theory. Policy makers ought to be especially concerned about the effects of ambiguity aversion, neglected in traditional studies of mechanism and market design, in situations where the agents are unfamiliar with the mechanism and the economic environment the mechanism creates. We unify the Multiple Prior Expected Utility (MEU) model of ambiguity aversion with the tools of contract theory to provide a general framework to analyze the effects of ambiguity aversion in market settings and use these tools to assess the effect of ambiguity aversion on auctions and bargaining problems. We show that the first and second price auction cannot be ranked when the agents are ambiguity averse, derive the optimal auction format, and study the effects of ambiguity on auction entry. We also prove that ambiguity aversion can be efficiency enhancing in ex ante budget balanced mechanisms and revenue enhancing in ex post efficient bargaining mechanisms.