Obvious manipulations

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Troyan, Peter; Morrill, Thayer
• 署名单位: University of Virginia; North Carolina State University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2019.104970
• 发表日期: 2020
• 关键词: Obvious strategy-proofness; incentives; manipulability; mechanism design

摘要

A mechanism is strategy-proof if agents can never profitably manipulate it, in any state of the world; however, not all non-strategy-proof mechanisms are equally easy to manipulate - some are more obviously manipulable than others. We propose a formal definition of an obvious manipulation in which agents compare worst cases to worst cases and best cases to best cases. We show that a profitable manipulation is obvious if and only if it can be identified as profitable by a cognitively limited agent who is unable to engage in contingent reasoning, as in Li (2017). Finally, we show that this system of categorization is both tractable and intuitively appealing by classifying common non-strategy-proof mechanisms as either obviously manipulable (OM) or not obviously manipulable (NOM). (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.