Models of choice where agents see others as less sophisticated than themselves have significantly different, sometimes more accurate, predictions in games than does Nash equilibrium. When it comes to the maximal set of functions that are implementable in mechanism design, however, they turn out to have surprisingly similar implications. Focusing on single-valued rules, we discuss the role and i...

Mechanisms design has traditionally been a manual endeavor. In 2002, Conitzer and Sandholm introduced the automated mechanism design (AMD) approach, where the mechanism is computationally created for the specific problem instance at hand. This has several advantages: 1) it can yield better mechanisms than the ones known to date, 2) it applies beyond the problem classes studied manually to date,...

Game theory is becoming central to the design and analysis of computational mechanisms in which multiple entities interact strategically. The tools of mechanism design are used extensively to engineer incentives for truth revelation into resource allocation (e.g. combinatorial auctions) and preference aggregation protocols (e.g. voting). We argue that mechanism design can also be useful in the ...

Multi-contracting practices prevail in many organizations be they public (governments) or private (markets). This article surveys the literature on common agency, a major example of such multi-contracting settings. I first highlight some specific features of common agency games that distinguish them from centralized contracting. Then, I review the tools needed to describe allocations which are ...

We consider mechanism design problems in which agents perceive Knightian uncertainty. Uncertainty is formalized using incomplete preferences, as in Bewley (1986). Without completeness, individual decision making depends on a set of beliefs, and an action is preferred to another if and only if it has larger expected utility for all beliefs in this set. We consider two natural notions of incentiv...

Game theory provides methods to predict the outcome of a given game. Mechanism design concerns the reverse question: given some desirable outcome, can we design a game which produces it? Formally, the environment is hA,N,Θi , where A is a set of feasible and verifiable alternatives or outcomes, N = {1, ..., n} is a set of agents, and Θ is a set of possible states of the world. We focus on priva...

This thesis is a collection of three essays on mechanism design. In Chapter 1, we consider a general Informed Principal Problem in the context of procurement. Both the potential suppliers and the buyer hold some private information: each supplier knows his cost of production, the buyer knows how much each supplier's product fits her technical requirements. We derive the optimal auction in this ...

Computational mechanism design brings together the concern in microeconomics with decision making in the context of distributed private information and self-interest and the concern in computer science with computational and communication complexity. In constructing mechanisms, with application to the design of electronic markets and to protocols for automated negotiation, many new issues arise...

This paper attends to the problem of a mechanism designer seeking to influence the outcome of a strategic game based on her creditability. The mechanism designer offers additional payments to the players depending on their mutual choice of strategies in order to steer them to certain decisions. Of course, the mechanism designer aims at spending as little as possible and yet implementing her des...