Robust Bilateral Trade Mechanisms with Known Expectations

We study the design of revenue-maximizing bilateral trade mechanisms in the correlated private value environment. We assume the designer only knows the expectations of the agents values, but knows neither the marginal distribution nor the correlation structure. The performance of a mechanism is evaluated in the worst-case over the uncertainty of joint distributions that are consistent with the known expectations. Among all dominant-strategy incentive compatible and ex-post individually rational mechanisms, we provide a complete characterization of the maxmin trade mechanisms and the worst-case joint distributions.