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OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
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Information Games and Robust Trading Mechanisms
Agents about to engage in economic transactions may take costly actions to influence their own or others’ information: costly signaling, information acquisition, hard evidence disclosure, and so forth. We study the problem of optimally designing a mechanism to be robust to all such activities, here termed “information games.” The designer cares about welfare, and explicitly takes the costs incurred in information games into account. We adopt a simple bilateral trade model as a case study. Any trading mechanism is evaluated by the expected welfare, net of information game costs, that it guarantees in the worst case across all possible games. Dominant-strategy mechanisms are natural candidates for the optimum, since there is never any incentive to manipulate information. We find that for some parameter values, a dominant-strategy mechanism is indeed optimal; for others, the optimum is a non-dominant-strategy mechanism, in which one party chooses which of two trading prices to offer.
Please sign up for meetings below:
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1r32GYl_eL8bInJ04hTBz1ezVGXB8YitXA3om1Yjoh5I/edit#gid=0
Date:
14 June 2019, 14:15
Venue:
Manor Road Building, Manor Road OX1 3UQ
Venue Details:
Seminar Room A
Speaker:
Gabriel Carroll (Stanford University)
Organising department:
Department of Economics
Part of:
Nuffield Economic Theory Seminar
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editor:
Melis Clark
