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...

Mechanism Design is concerned with how to implement system wide solutions to problems that involve multiple self-interested agents, each with private information about their preferences. Mechanism Design Optimization Problem is a mechanism design problem where the output specification is given by a positive real valued objective function and a set of feasible outputs, and we require an output t...

Distributed Algorithmic Mechanism Design Rahul Sami 2003 Distributed algorithmic mechanism design (DAMD) is an approach to designing distributed systems that takes into account both the distributed-computational environment and the incentives of autonomous agents. In this dissertation, we study two problems, multicast cost sharing and interdomain routing. We also touch upon several issues impor...

In situations in which the social planner has to make several decisions over time, before agents have observed all the relevant information, static mechanisms may not su¢ ce to induce agents to reveal their information truthfully. This paper focuses on questions of partial and full implementation in dynamic mechanisms, when agents’ beliefs are unknown to the designer (hence the term “robust”). ...

We consider a simple mechanism design problem with private values in which each agent perceives Knightian uncertainty over his opponents’ types. Uncertainty is formalized using incomplete preferences as in Bewley (1986). We show that the seller can extract all gains from trade with a direct mechanism in which truth-telling is a Nash equilibrium, in the sense that no buyer has a unilateral incen...

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t JEL classification: C72 C78 D44 D82 Keywords: Bilateral trading k-Double auctions Incomplete contracts Investment incentives Optimal mechanism Opt-out clause We characterize the surplus-maximizing trading mechanism under two-sided incomplete information and interim individual rationality, when one party can make a value-enhancing specific investment. This m...

We present the design of a structured search engine which returns a multi-column table in response to a query consisting of keywords describing each of its columns. We answer such queries by exploiting the millions of tables on the Web because these are much richer sources of structured knowledge than free-format text. However, a corpus of tables harvested from arbitrary HTML web pages presents...

Conventional abstraction queries, like sco pe look for and neighbouring acquaintance retrieval, absorb alone altitude on objects’ symmetrical properties. Today, plentiful avantgarde requests alarm for atypical sorts of queries that aim to acquisition altar acceptable each an abstraction predicate, and assert on their associated test as an example, rather than as a result of all the restaurants,...