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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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2003

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Dominant strategies

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Robust Mechanism Design, Dirk Bergemann, Stephen Morris May 2003

Robust Mechanism Design, Dirk Bergemann, Stephen Morris

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

The mechanism design literature assumes too much common knowledge of the environment among the players and planner. We relax this assumption by studying implementation on richer type spaces, with more higher order uncertainty. We study the “ex post equivalence” question: when is interim implementation on all possible type spaces equivalent to requiring ex post implementation on the space of payoff types? We show that ex post equivalence holds when the social choice correspondence is a function and in simple quasi-linear environments. When ex post equivalence holds, we identify how large the type space must be to obtain the equivalence. We …


Robust Mechanism Design, Dirk Bergemann, Stephen Morris May 2003

Robust Mechanism Design, Dirk Bergemann, Stephen Morris

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

The mechanism design literature assumes too much common knowledge of the environment among the players and planner. We relax this assumption by studying implementation on richer type spaces. We ask when ex post implementation is equivalent to interim (or Bayesian) implementation for all possible type spaces. The equivalence holds in the case of separable environments; examples of separable environments arise (1) when the planner is implementing a social choice function (not correspondence); and (2) in a quasilinear environment with no restrictions on transfers. The equivalence fails in general, including in some quasilinear environments with budget balance. In private value environments, …