Auctions, mechanisms and uncertainty

Abstract

Mechanisms through which individuals interact may have important impact on the outcomes of this interaction. The economic theory of mechanism design is concerned with the design of social decision procedures for situations in which economic agents own relevant private information and behave, i.e. use it, strategically. As an example, consider the case in which the central authority of a country is studying the possibility of declaring national reserve a given geographic area. In order to come up with the optimal decision, that for instance maximizes social welfare, it should be conditioned on the related information owned by cities, states, or individuals. They might be asked directly for their opinion on the underlying problem, but will not report their information truthfully unless proper incentives are given to them through monetary transfers or some other instruments controlled by the authority. In other words, mechanism design theory is concerned with the harmonization of incentives that must be applied to a set of agents that interact in order to get those agents to exhibit some desired behavior, i.e. in order the schemes to work as intended. The central authority, or social planner, of this example who acts on behalf of the whole society can also be replaced by an imaginary social goal or by a principal who is pursuing his own interest. The formalization of this problem can be find in the seminal work by Hurwicz (1972). Nevertheless, one of the first applications that can be considered as from the theory of mechanism design is due to Hayek who started to study the limitations on the amount of information that central planners can acquire in the early 1920s. He considered a large scale problem focusing his attention on the free market mechanism. He fiercely opposed to the socialist system from every angle and described the main problem as a problem of information. A similar application is the design of a constitution that determines the actions that agents may take (strategy space) and the electoral rules that transform votes into decisions (outcome function). Along with the literature on the ways of reducing market failures, on optimal taxation and public good theory, the design of auctions is also subject of the field of mechanism design. This thesis dissertation is divided into three chapters that present self-contained studies of economic situations in which private information, i.e. uncertainty, plays an important role. In deriving the results game theoretic tools and the approach taken by the mechanism design literature are used. The first chapter proposes the use of the multibidding mechanism (check Pérez-Castrillo y Wettstein (2002)) in situations with imperfect information and explores its theoretical properties. The second chapter is an empirical work, it uses experimental data and tests the theoretical predictions of the first. The thesis ends with the study of fairness concepts in an environment in which agents take their decisions under uncertainty.

Date of Award	9 Sept 2004
Original language	Undefined/Unknown
Supervisor	Jesús David Pérez Castrillo (Director)