Robust mechanism design and social preferences

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Bierbrauer, Felix; Ockenfels, Axel; Pollak, Andreas; Rueckert, Desiree
• 署名单位: University of Cologne
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2017.03.003
• 发表日期: 2017
• 页码: 59-80
• 关键词: Robust mechanism design; social preferences; bilateral trade; income taxation

摘要

We study two classic challenges in mechanism design - bilateral trade a la Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983) and redistributive income taxation a la Mirrlees (1971) and Piketty (1993) - to show that some standard mechanism design solutions systematically fail with social preferences. We therefore introduce the notion of a social-preference-robust mechanism which works not only for selfish but also for social preferences of different nature and intensity, and characterize the optimal mechanism for this class. With the help of a series of laboratory experiments we find that behavior can indeed be better controlled with social-preference-robust mechanisms. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.