ROBUSTNESS AND SEPARATION IN MULTIDIMENSIONAL SCREENING

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Carroll, Gabriel
• 署名单位: Stanford University
• 刊物名称: ECONOMETRICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0012-9682
• DOI: 10.3982/ECTA14165
• 发表日期: 2017
• 页码: 453-488
• 关键词: price-discrimination; revenue maximization; mechanism design; monopoly; insurance; taxation; GOODS

摘要

A principal wishes to screen an agent along several dimensions of private information simultaneously. The agent has quasilinear preferences that are additively separable across the various components. We consider a robust version of the principal's problem, in which she knows the marginal distribution of each component of the agent's type, but does not know the joint distribution. Any mechanism is evaluated by its worst-case expected profit, over all joint distributions consistent with the known marginals. We show that the optimum for the principal is simply to screen along each component separately. This result does not require any assumptions (such as single crossing) on the structure of preferences within each component. The proof technique involves a generalization of the concept of virtual values to arbitrary screening problems. Sample applications include monopoly pricing and a stylized dynamic taxation model.