Informational smallness and the scope for limiting information rents

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Gizatulina, Alia; Hellwig, Martin
• 署名单位: Max Planck Society
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2010.07.007
• 发表日期: 2010
• 页码: 2260-2281
• 关键词: Surplus extraction; mechanism design; BDP; Informational smallness; Correlated information; universal type space; public goods

摘要

For an incomplete-information model of public-good provision with interim participation constraints, we show that efficient outcomes can be approximated, with approximately full surplus extraction, when there are many agents and each agent is informationally small. The result holds even if agents' payoffs cannot be unambiguously inferred from their beliefs. The contrary result of Neeman [Z. Neeman, The relevance of private information in mechanism design, J. Econ. Theory 117 (2004) 55-77] rests on an implicit uniformity requirement that is incompatible with the notion that agents are informationally small because there are many other agents who have information about them. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.