On the hardness of designing public signals

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Dughmi, Shaddin
• 署名单位: University of Southern California
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2018.08.001
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 609-625
• 关键词: Signaling; persuasion; information structures

摘要

We use computational complexity as a lens to study the design of information structures in games of incomplete information. We focus on one of the simplest instantiations of the information structure design problem: Bayesian zero-sum games, and a principal who must design a public signal maximizing the equilibrium payoff of one of the players. In this setting, we show that optimal information structure design is computationally intractable, and in some cases hard to approximate, assuming that it is hard to recover a planted clique from an Erclos-Renyi random graph. Our result suggests that there is no simple characterization of optimal public-channel information structures in multi-player settings. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.