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An Introduction
to the Theory
of Mechanism Design
An Introduction
to the Theory
of Mechanism Design
Tilman Börgers
With a chapter by
3
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide.
With offices in
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1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
1. Introduction 1
2. Screening 6
2.1. Introduction 6
2.2. Pricing a Single Indivisible Good 6
2.3. Nonlinear Pricing 18
2.4. Bundling 27
2.5. Remarks on the Literature 29
2.6. Problems 29
vii
viii Contents
5. Incentive Compatibility 95
5.1. Introduction 95
5.2. Setup 95
5.3. Weak Monotonicity 96
5.4. Cyclical Monotonicity 99
5.5. Cyclical Monotonicity When Outcomes Are Lotteries 102
5.6. One-Dimensional Type Spaces 103
5.7. Rich Type Spaces 108
5.8. Revenue Equivalence 109
5.9. Individual Rationality 110
5.10. Remarks on the Literature 111
5.11. Problems 111
ix Contents
Notes 235
Bibliography 239
Index 245
PREFACE
The first objective of this text is to give rigorous but accessible explanations of classic
results in the theory of mechanism design. The second objective is to take the reader
in selected areas to the frontiers of research. The description of recent areas of re-
search is, by necessity, a little more subjective than the description of classic results.
The reader may turn to recent literature in the field to learn about perspectives that
are different from the authors’.
This book is meant for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of ec-
onomics who have a good understanding of game theory. Fudenberg and Tirole
(1993) contains more than the reader needs for this book. I shall also assume a basic
knowledge of real analysis that can, for example, be acquired from Rudin (1976).
This book started out as lecture notes for a class that I taught at the University of
Michigan in the Winter Semester 2006. At the time, as far as I was aware, no books on
mechanism design existed. As I was working excruciatingly slowly on my text, several
excellent books appeared that cover topics similar to mine. Whenever I discovered
such a book, to maintain my own motivation, I needed to persuade myself that there
are important differences between other authors’ books and my own. These excellent
books, along with the justifications for the existence of my own book, are listed below
in chronological order. I include them here, even though they are in some sense com-
petitors of my own text, to serve the primary purpose of a book such as mine, which
is to help others to obtain a comprehensive picture of the field. The following books,
hopefully together with my own book, will be extremely useful as the reader embarks
on this endeavor.
The theory of mechanism design was created by Leonid Hurwicz, who won the 2007
Nobel Prize for it, together with Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson. The focus of this
text is on informational efficiency and privacy preservation in mechanisms. Incentive
aspects play a much smaller role than they do in this book.
xi
xii Preface
This book covers material similar to that of Hurwicz and Reiter. The emphasis that
both books place on the size of the message space in a mechanism differentiates them
from more modern treatments of mechanism design. However, as we shall discuss in
this book, in particular in Chapter 10, the complexity or simplicity of mechanisms, one
aspect of which is the size of the message space, seems to be of continuing importance
and may be central for future research.
This book is closest to mine among those listed here, but it covers more than I do, such
as the theory of Nash implementation, the theory of matching markets, and empirical
evidence on mechanisms. Sometimes I wish I had written this book. My own book
is more narrowly focused, perhaps goes somewhat into greater depth, and places a
greater emphasis on the relation between game theoretic foundations and mechanism
design.
This is a superb book, demonstrating how large parts of the theory of mechanism de-
sign can be developed as an application of results from linear programming. Vohra
puts less emphasis than I do on the game theoretic aspects of mechanism design.
My comments on the books listed above already indicate some limitations of this
text. Two more require emphasis. First, I have not covered the theory of implementa-
tion. I explain in the remainder of this paragraph what specifically I mean by this, but
I note that this paragraph may be comprehensible to readers only after they have read
this book. I understand the literature on implementation to be that part of the liter-
ature on mechanisms that requires the mechanism designer to consider all equilibria
of the mechanism that she proposes, as opposed the literature on mechanism design,
which allows the mechanism designer to select one among the equilibria of the mech-
anism that she proposes. This terminology is not universally used, but it will be useful
in this book. Note that whenever we invoke the revelation principle, we are in the
xiii Preface
realm of the theory of mechanism design rather than the theory of implementation.
I mentioned already that the book by Diamantaras et al. cited above includes chapters
on implementation. Extremely useful is also:
I have left out the subject of implementation, not because it would not be impor-
tant, but because it has been explained so well by others and because it would require
many techniques and arguments very different from the ones invoked in this book.
Having said this, I continue to feel guilty for leaving out this subject.1
I have also not covered the contributions to the theory of mechanism design made
by computer scientists. A survey of these contributions can be found in Chapters
9–16 of:
• Noam Nisan, Tim Roughgarden, Eva Tardos, and Vijay V. Vazirani. Algorithmic
Game Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
I have omitted this work from my book because I am not sufficiently familiar with it.
For example, I am currently reading at my usual snail’s pace through the survey chap-
ters mentioned above. But while I am doing this, the number of papers on mechanism
design written by computer scientists seems to grow at breathtaking speed. Finding
out how to stay abreast of these developments and how to integrate my knowledge of
economists’ research with whatever I can learn about computer scientists’ research is
a task so large that I cannot realistically tackle it in this book.
A very large subject that readers might find fascinating is the subject of mechanism
design in practice. This subject requires a separate book, or multiple books. Examples
of surveys which the reader might find useful are:
• Alvin E. Roth. What have we learned from market design? Economic Journal, 118
285–310, 2008.
• Peter Cramton, Spectrum auction design. Review of Industrial Organization, 42
161–190, 2013.
In contrast to these works, the emphasis of this book is on the methodology of the
theory of mechanism design. I may now already have lost readers with a more practical
bent. But, to keep those readers who have stuck with me up to now, it is time to begin.2
This text explains the parts of the theory of mechanism design that I believe I have
understood. Whatever I have understood, I have mostly learned from others’ books
and articles, from students who have politely listened to me and told me where I was
going wrong, and from my co-authors during our joint research.
One area in which my lack of knowledge was particularly comprehensive is the the-
ory of dynamic mechanism design. Daniel Krähmer and Roland Strausz generously
agreed to take over the task of writing a chapter on this subject. Their work is included
here as Chapter 11.
Christoph Kuzmics allowed me to see some problems that he gave to his students
when teaching a class based on this book. I have included some problems here that
were inspired by Christoph’s problems.
I would also like to thank the anonymous referees of Oxford University Press as well
as Stefan Behringer, George Chen, Shaowei Ke, Christoph Kuzmics, Xian Li, Vitor
Farinha Luz, Stephen Morris, Colin von Negenborn, Martin Pollrich, Arunava Sen,
Xianwen Shi, Jan-Henrik Steg, Roland Strausz, and Tobias Widmer for very helpful
corrections, comments, and suggestions.
Trevor Burnham, Yan-Min Choo, and Nikoleta Scekic have proofread various parts
of this book. They have caught many embarrassing errors. I am immensely grateful to
them.
I have benefited a lot from Vijay Krishna’s (2002) and Paul Milgrom’s (2004)
books on auction theory. The exposition in Chapters 2 and 3 owes a lot to these books.
The idea to present the screening problem in Chapter 2 before turning to mechanism
design proper has its origin in a conversation with Mark Armstrong.
I am grateful to Daniel and Roland for agreeing to donate all authors’ income from
this book to Amnesty International. Even if you feel after reading the book that you
have wasted your time, rest assured that you have not completely wasted your money.
Some of it benefits a good cause.
xv
1
INTRODUCTION
Suppose you want to sell your house, and your realtor has identified several potential
buyers who are willing to pay your ask price. You might then wish to conduct an auc-
tion among these buyers to obtain a higher price. There are many different auction
formats that you could use: For example, each buyer could be asked to send in one
binding and final bid. Alternatively, buyers could bid in several rounds, and in each
round they are all informed about the highest bid of the previous round and are then
asked to revise their bids. You could also use some combination of these formats. How
should you choose among different auction formats? This is one of the questions that
the theory of mechanism design aims to answer.
Now imagine that you and your colleagues are considering whether to buy a new
refrigerator to be kept at work, in which you can store food that you bring from home.
While everyone is in favor, it is not so clear how much the refrigerator is worth to
different people. How can you find out whether the sum of the amounts that every-
one would at most be willing to contribute covers the cost of the refrigerator? You
could ask everyone to submit pledges simultaneously and then see whether the sum
of the pledges covers the expense. Alternatively, you could go around and tell each col-
league how much everyone else has pledged so far. Or you could divide the cost by the
1
2 Theory of Mechanism Design
number of colleagues involved and commit to buying the refrigerator only if everyone
is willing to pay their share. Which of these procedures is best? Again, this is one of the
questions that the theory of mechanism design addresses.
Each of the procedures that you might consider in the two examples above creates
a strategic game in the sense of noncooperative game theory among the participants.
Participants in these procedures will understand that the outcome will depend not
only on their own choices but also on others’ choices and that therefore their own
optimal strategy may depend on others’ strategies. In other words, the participants in
these procedures will understand that they are playing a noncooperative game. The
theory of mechanism design therefore builds on the theory of games (Fudenberg and
Tirole, 1993). Game theory takes the rules of the game as given, and it makes predic-
tions about the behavior of strategic players. The theory of mechanism design is about
the optimal choice of the rules of the game.
We are more frequently involved in the design of rules for games than might be
obvious at first sight. How should shareholders’ votes be conducted? How should
promotion procedures in companies be organized? What are optimal prenuptial
agreements? All these questions are about the optimal rules of games. The theory of
mechanism design seeks to study the general structure underlying all these applica-
tions, but it also considers a number of particularly prominent applications in detail.
There are at least two reasons why we study mechanism design. First, the theory
of mechanism design aids in practice the designers of real-world mechanisms. The
theory of optimal auctions, for example, is frequently invoked in discussions about
the design of government and industry auctions. One could call this first aspect of the
theory of mechanism design the “normative” side of mechanism design. Second, we
can explain why real-world institutions are as they are by interpreting them as rational
choices of those who designed them. For example, we might seek to explain the use of
auctions in some house sales, as well as the use of posted prices in other house sales
by appealing to the theory of mechanism design which indicates that posted prices are
optimal in some circumstances and auctions are optimal in other circumstances. One
could call this second aspect of the theory of mechanism design the “positive” side of
mechanism design.
The incentives created by the choice of rules of games are central to the theory
of mechanism design. Incentives are also at the center of contract theory (Bolton
and Dewatripont, 2005). At first sight the distinction between the theory of mech-
anism design and contract theory is simple: In contract theory, we study the optimal
design of incentives for a single agent. In mechanism design, we study the optimal de-
sign of incentives for a group of agents, such as the buyers in our first example and
the colleagues in the second example. Contract theory therefore, unlike the theory of
mechanism design, does not have to deal with strategic interaction.
3 Introduction
The relation between contract theory and the theory of mechanism design is,
however, more subtle. One part of the theory of mechanism design is, in fact, a
straightforward extension of insights from contract theory. This is surprising because
one might have expected the element of strategic interaction, which is present in
mechanism design but absent in contract theory, to create substantial new problems.
It is interesting and conceptually important to understand why this is not the case, and
we shall address this issue in detail below. The close parallel between contract theory
and mechanism design applies only to some parts of mechanism design. Other parts
of mechanism design are unrelated to contract theory.
Contract theory has traditionally been divided into two parts: the theory of hid-
den information (also referred to as the theory of “adverse selection”) and the theory
of hidden action (also referred to as the theory of “moral hazard”). The distinction
is easily explained within the context of contracts for health insurance. Whether you
have experienced severe chest pain in the past is something that you know, but that
the company from which you are trying to buy health insurance does not know. It is
“hidden information.” Whether you exercise regularly, or take it a little more easy once
you have bought complete insurance coverage for heart surgery, is a choice that you
make that your insurance company does not observe unless it puts into place a surveil-
lance operation. It is a “hidden action.” Both hiddens, information and actions, matter
for contract design. For example, by offering you a menu of insurance contracts and
observing your choice from this menu, an insurance company might be able to infer
information about your health risks that you might wish to conceal from the com-
pany. By introducing deductibles, an insurance company might seek to maintain your
incentives to look after your own health and thus alleviate moral hazard problems.
Mechanism design, as traditionally understood, is about hidden information, not
hidden actions, with multiple agents. In our first example, the hidden information that
the seller of a house seeks to find out is the buyers’ true willingness to pay for the house.
In our second example in this Introduction, the hidden information that we seek to
find out is the colleagues’ true willingness to pay for an office refrigerator. In voting,
the hidden information that we seek to find out is individuals’ true ranking of differ-
ent alternatives or candidates. Of course, hidden action with many agents involved is
a subject of great interest, and the theory that deals with it is, like the theory of mech-
anism design, concerned with the optimal choice of rules for a game. For example,
promotion schemes within a company set work incentives for a group of employees,
and the optimal choice of such schemes is an important subject of economic theory.
However, it is not the subject of mechanism design as the term has traditionally been
interpreted.
When choosing the rules for the strategic interaction among agents, we might re-
strict ourselves to a small subset of all conceivable rules; or we might try to cast our net
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