No Arabic abstract
How to guarantee that firms perform due diligence before launching potentially dangerous products? We study the design of liability rules when (i) limited liability prevents firms from internalizing the full damage they may cause, (ii) penalties are paid only if damage occurs, regardless of the products inherent riskiness, (iii) firms have private information about their products riskiness before performing due diligence. We show that (i) any liability mechanism can be implemented by a tariff that depends only on the evidence acquired by the firm if a damage occurs, not on any initial report by the firm about its private information, (ii) firms that assign a higher prior to product riskiness always perform more due diligence but less than is socially optimal, and (iii) under a simple and intuitive condition, any type-specific launch thresholds can be implemented by a monotonic tariff.
A common assumption in auction theory is that the information available to the agents is given exogenously and that the auctioneer has full control over the market. In practice, agents might be able to acquire information about their competitors before the auction (by exerting some costly effort), and might be able to resell acquired items in an aftermarket. The auctioneer has no control over those aspects, yet their existence influences agents strategic behavior and the overall equilibrium welfare can strictly decrease as a result. We show that if an auction is smooth (e.g., first-price auction, all-pay auction), then the corresponding price of anarchy bound due to smoothness continues to hold in any environment with (a) information acquisition on opponents valuations, and/or (b) an aftermarket satisfying two mild conditions (voluntary participation and weak budget balance). We also consider the special case with two ex ante symmetric bidders, where the first-price auction is known to be efficient in isolation. We show that information acquisition can lead to efficiency loss in this environment, but aftermarkets do not: any equilibrium of a first-price or all-pay auction combined with an aftermarket is still efficient.
We study the problem of repeatedly auctioning off an item to one of $k$ bidders where: a) bidders have a per-round individual rationality constraint, b) bidders may leave the mechanism at any point, and c) the bidders valuations are adversarially chosen (the prior-free setting). Without these constraints, the auctioneer can run a second-price auction to sell the business and receive the second highest total value for the entire stream of items. We show that under these constraints, the auctioneer can attain a constant fraction of the sell the business benchmark, but no more than $2/e$ of this benchmark. In the course of doing so, we design mechanisms for a single bidder problem of independent interest: how should you repeatedly sell an item to a (per-round IR) buyer with adversarial valuations if you know their total value over all rounds is $V$ but not how their value changes over time? We demonstrate a mechanism that achieves revenue $V/e$ and show that this is tight.
We consider an example of stochastic games with partial, asymmetric and non-classical information. We obtain relevant equilibrium policies using a new approach which allows managing the belief updates in a structured manner. Agents have access only to partial information updates, and our approach is to consider optimal open loop control until the information update. The agents continuously control the rates of their Poisson search clocks to acquire the locks, the agent to get all the locks before others would get reward one. However, the agents have no information about the acquisition status of others and will incur a cost proportional to their rate process. We solved the problem for the case with two agents and two locks and conjectured the results for $N$-agents. We showed that a pair of (partial) state-dependent time-threshold policies form a Nash equilibrium.
We consider the model of the data broker selling information to a single agent to maximize his revenue. The agent has private valuation for the additional information, and upon receiving the signal from the data broker, the agent can conduct her own experiment to refine her posterior belief on the states with additional costs. In this paper, we show that in the optimal mechanism, the agent has no incentive to acquire any additional costly information under equilibrium. Still, the ability to acquire additional information distorts the incentives of the agent, and reduces the optimal revenue of the data broker. In addition, we show that under the separable valuation assumption, there is no distortion at the top, and posting a deterministic price for fully revealing the states is optimal when the prior distribution is sufficiently informative or the cost of acquiring additional information is sufficiently high, and is approximately optimal when the type distribution satisfies the monotone hazard rate condition.
Army cadets obtain occupations through a centralized process. Three objectives -- increasing retention, aligning talent, and enhancing trust -- have guided reforms to this process since 2006. West Points mechanism for the Class of 2020 exacerbated challenges implementing Army policy aims. We formulate these desiderata as axioms and study their implications theoretically and with administrative data. We show that the Armys objectives not only determine an allocation mechanism, but also a specific priority policy, a uniqueness result that integrates mechanism and priority design. These results led to a re-design of the mechanism, now adopted at both West Point and ROTC.