Mechanism Design and Intentions

Mechanism design and intentions

We introduce intention-based social preferences into a mechanism design framework with independent private values and quasilinear payoffs. For the case where the designer has no information about the intensity of social preferences, we provide conditions under which mechanisms which have been designed under the assumption that agents are selfish can still be implemented. For the case where prec...

Giveaway drugs: good intentions, bad design.

Cryptography and Mechanism Design

Mechanism Design is the algorithmic component of Game Theory, the synthesis of protocols for selfish parties to achieve certain properties. A protocol is a me thod to aggregate the preferences of the parties in order to decide on some "social choice," where typical examples include: deciding whether a community should build a bridge, how to route packets in a network and deciding who wins an au...

Mechanism Design and Payments∗

We introduce a model in which agents face random and unobservable needs to transact over time. We characterize the optimal setup for incentive compatible transactions, the optimal payment system. The existence of an equilibrium in which agents transact through a payment system might require certain caps on short-term borrowing. Networks that have knowledge of agents’ histories support efficient...

Mechanism Design

A social choice function: A function that determines a social choice according to players’ preferences over the different possible alternatives. A mechanism: a game in incomplete information, in which player strategies are based on their private preferences. A mechanism implements a social choice function f if the equilibrium strategies yield an outcome that coincides with f . Dominant strategi...