Robust virtual implementation: Toward a reinterpretation of the Wilson doctrine

Artemov, Georgy; Kunimoto, Takashi; Serrano, Roberto

doi:10.1016/j.jet.2012.12.015

Cited by 37 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…For example, if the voters have complete information about one another, then any social choice rule can be virtually implemented in Nash equilibrium (Abreu and Sen, 1991) or iterated undominated strategies (Abreu and Matsushima, 1992). Even with incomplete information, a very large class of social choice rules can be virtually implemented in Bayesian Nash equilibrium (Serrano and Vohra, 2005), or even robustly virtually implemented (Artemov et al, 2013). Since virtual implementation is the implementation technology most suited to the probabilistic approach taken in this paper, we consider the implementation problem to be essentially solved, for our purposes.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Statistical Utilitarianism

Pivato

2016

The Political Economy of Social Choices

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We show that, in a sufficiently large population satisfying certain statistical regularities, it is often possible to accurately estimate the utilitarian social welfare function, even if we only have very noisy data about individual utility functions and interpersonal utility comparisons. In particular, we show that it is often possible to identify an optimal or close-to-optimal utilitarian social choice using voting rules such as the Borda rule, approval voting, relative utilitarianism, or any Condorcetconsistent rule.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Statistical Utilitarianism

Pivato

2016

The Political Economy of Social Choices

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“…Two distinct payo¤ types cannot have the same preference over constant lotteries, i.e., Artemov, Kunimoto, and Serrano (2008) show that if pseudo-type diversity is satis…ed, then robust virtual implementation will always be possible if the appropriate incentive compatibility conditions are satis…ed (their Theorem 1). The idea is that agents' payo¤ types can then be identi…ed by their preferences over constant lotteries and the Abreu and Matsushima (1992c)-style argument applied.…”

Section: Intermediate Robustness Notionsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…In a recent paper, Artemov, Kunimoto, and Serrano (2008) consider what happens to robust virtual implementation results if one imposes some restrictions on agents' beliefs in the payo¤ environment. In particular, call a pair ( i ; i ) 2 i ( i ) a "pseudo-type" and suppose that we add the common knowledge that agent i's pseudo-type ( i ; i ) belongs to a subset T i i ( i ).…”

Section: Intermediate Robustness Notionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Artemov, Kunimoto, and Serrano (2008) assume a slightly stronger version of pseudo-type diversity: they assume that each Ti is …nite and that distinct pseudo-types have distinct preferences over constant lotteries even if they correspond to the same payo¤ type, i.e., ( i; i) ; (…”

Section: Intermediate Robustness Notionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our operationalization of the "Wilson doctrine" is rather strong: we put no restrictions on agents'beliefs and higher order beliefs. A recent paper of Artemov, Kunimoto, and Serrano (2008) examines what happens to the conditions for robust virtual implementation if the planner is given partial information about agents'beliefs, in particular, a subset of beliefs over others'payo¤s types that can arise with each payo¤ type. We discuss this intermediate robustness approach in section 6.3.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Robust Virtual Implementation

Bergemann

Morris

2012

Robust Mechanism Design

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In a general interdependent preference environment, we characterize when two payo¤ types can be distinguished by their rationalizable strategic choices without any prior knowledge of their beliefs and higher order beliefs. We show that two payo¤ types are strategically distinguishable if and only if they satisfy a separability condition. The separability condition for each agent essentially requires that there is not too much interdependence in preferences across agents.A social choice function -mapping payo¤ type pro…les to outcomes -can be robustly virtually implemented if there exists a mechanism such that every equilibrium on every type space achieves an outcome arbitrarily close to the social choice function. This de…nition is equivalent to requiring virtual implementation in iterated deletion of strategies that are strictly dominated for all beliefs. The social choice function is robustly measurable if strategically indistinguishable payo¤ types receive the same allocation. We show that ex post incentive compatibility and robust measurability are necessary and su¢ cient for robust virtual implementation.

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Information Elicitation for Bayesian Auctions

Chen

2018

Algorithmic Game Theory

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In this paper we design information elicitation mechanisms for Bayesian auctions. While in Bayesian mechanism design the distributions of the players' private types are often assumed to be common knowledge, information elicitation considers the situation where the players know the distributions better than the decision maker. To weaken the information assumption in Bayesian auctions, we consider an information structure where the knowledge about the distributions is arbitrarily scattered among the players. In such an unstructured information setting, we design mechanisms for unit-demand auctions and additive auctions that aggregate the players' knowledge, generating revenue that are constant approximations to the optimal Bayesian mechanisms with a common prior. Our mechanisms are 2-step dominant-strategy truthful and the revenue increases gracefully with the amount of knowledge the players collectively have.Extensions of our results. In our main results, the seller asks the players to report the distributions in their entirety, without being concerned with the communication complexity for doing so. This is common in information elicitation and allows us to focus on the main difficulties in aggregating the players' knowledge. In Appendix D, we show how to modify our mechanisms so that the players only report a small amount of information about the distributions.Furthermore, in the main body of this paper we consider auction settings where a player i's knowledge about another player i ′ for an item j is exactly the prior distribution D i ′ j . This simplifies the description of the knowledge graphs. In Appendix E, we consider settings where a player may observe private signals about other players and can further refine the prior.Future directions. As Bayesian auctions require the seller (and the players under common-prior assumption) has correct knowledge about all distributions, in our main results we do not consider scenarios where players have "insider" knowledge. If the insider knowledge is correct (i.e., is a refinement of the prior), then our mechanisms' revenue increases; see Appendix E. Still, how to aggregate even the incorrect information that the players may have about each other is a very interesting question for future studies.Another important direction is to elicit players' information for BIC mechanisms. For example, the BIC mechanisms in [23,10] are optimal in their own settings, and it is unclear how to convert them to information elicitation mechanisms. Related WorkInformation elicitation. Following [35], information elicitation has become an important research area in the past decade [38,44,33]. A mechanism asks each player to report his private signal and his private knowledge about the prior distribution. The decision maker wants the mechanism to be BIC, and a player is rewarded based on his reported distribution and the other players' reported signals. Different from auctions, there are no allocations or prices, and a player's utility equals his reward. Proper scoring rules [9,22] are widely ...

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Robust virtual implementation: Toward a reinterpretation of the Wilson doctrine

Cited by 37 publications

References 20 publications

Statistical Utilitarianism

Statistical Utilitarianism

Robust Virtual Implementation

Information Elicitation for Bayesian Auctions

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