Economic Theory and Experimental Seminar - Gabriel Carroll (Stanford University)

ETES Series

Room 605, Level 6, 111 Barry Street, Carlton

Map

More Information

Alex Nichifor

nichifor@unimelb.edu.au

T: +61 3 8344 7420

Title:   Information Games and Robust Trading Mechanisms

Abstract:  Agents about to engage in economic transactions may take costly actions to influence their own or others’ information: costly signaling, information acquisition, hard evidence disclosure, and so forth. We study the problem of optimally designing a mechanism to be robust to all such activities, here termed information games. The designer cares about welfare, and explicitly takes the costs incurred in information games into account. We adopt a simple bilateral trade model as a case study. Any trading mechanism is evaluated by the expected welfare, net of information game costs, that it guarantees in the worst case across all possible games. Dominant-strategy mechanisms are natural candidates for the optimum, since there is never any incentive to manipulate information. We find that for some parameter values, a dominant-strategy mechanism is indeed optimal; for others, the optimum is a non-dominant-strategy mechanism, in which one party chooses which of two trading prices to offer.