Informationally Simple Incentives

• 成果类型: Article; Early Access
• 署名作者: Gleyze, Simon; Pernoud, Agathe
• 署名单位: Paris School of Economics; heSam Universite; Universite Pantheon-Sorbonne; Stanford University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-3808
• DOI: 10.1086/722089
• 发表日期: 2023
• 关键词: acquisition

摘要

We consider a mechanism design setting in which agents can acquire costly information on their preferences as well as others'. A mechanism is informationally simple if agents have no incentive to learn about others' preferences. This property is of interest for two reasons. First, it is a necessary condition for the existence of dominant-strategy equilibria in the extended game. Second, this endogenizes an independent-private-value property of the interim information structure. We show that, generically, a mechanism is informationally simple if and only if it satisfies a separability condition that rules out most economically meaningful mechanisms.