Quasi-Robust Multiagent Contracts

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Arya, Anil; Demski, Joel; Glover, Jonathan; Liang, Pierre
• 署名单位: University System of Ohio; Ohio State University; State University System of Florida; University of Florida; Carnegie Mellon University
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.1080.0967
• 发表日期: 2009
• 页码: 752-762
• 关键词: Auctions; robust mechanisms; multiagent contracts

摘要

A criticism of mechanism design theory is that the optimal mechanism designed for one environment can produce drastically different actions, outcomes, and payoffs in a second, even slightly different, environment. In this sense, the theoretically optimal mechanisms usually studied are not robust. To study robust mechanisms while maintaining an expected utility maximization approach, we study a multiagent model in which the mechanism must be designed before the environment is as well understood as is usually assumed. The particular model is of an auction setting with binary private values. Our main result is that if the prior belief about the correlation in the agents' values is diffuse enough, the optimal Bayesian-Nash auction must also satisfy dominant strategy incentive constraints. Furthermore, when the optimal auction does provide dominant strategy incentives, it takes one of two forms: (i) if perfect correlation and negative correlation are excluded as possibilities, the auction incorporates all information about the prior belief over the possible correlations, and (ii) if either perfect correlation or negative correlation is a possibility, the auction does not incorporate any correlation information and can be described as a modified Vickrey auction.