An experimental study on the incentives of the probabilistic serial mechanism

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Hugh-Jones, David; Kurino, Morimitsu; Vanberg, Christoph
• 署名单位: University of Essex; University of Tsukuba; Ruprecht Karls University Heidelberg
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2014.06.001
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 367-380
• 关键词: Probabilistic serial mechanism; incentives

摘要

We report an experiment on the Probabilistic Serial (PS) mechanism for allocating indivisible goods. The PS mechanism, a recently discovered alternative to the widely used Random Serial Dictatorship mechanism, has attractive fairness and efficiency properties if people report their preferences truthfully. However, the mechanism is not strategy-proof, so participants may not truthfully report their preferences. We investigate misreporting in a set of simple applications of the PS mechanism. We confront subjects with situations in which the theory suggests that there is an incentive or no incentive to misreport. We find little misreporting in situations where misreporting is a Nash equilibrium. However, we also find a significant degree of misreporting in situations where there is actually no benefit to doing so. These findings suggest that the PS mechanism may have problems in terms of truthful elicitation. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.