Mechanism Design

• "Are Simple Mechanisms Optimal when Agents are Unsophisticated?" (with Piotr Dworczak). NEW!​​
  • Abstract: We study the design of mechanisms involving agents that have limited strategic sophistication. The literature has identified several notions of simple mechanisms in which agents can determine their optimal strategy even if they lack cognitive skills such as predicting other agents' strategies (strategy-proof mechanisms), contingent reasoning (obviously strategy-proof mechanisms), or foresight (strongly obviously strategy-proof mechanisms). We examine whether it is optimal for the mechanism designer who faces strategically unsophisticated agents to offer a mechanism from the corresponding class of simple mechanisms. We show that when the designer uses a mechanism that is not simple, while she loses the ability to predict play, she may nevertheless be better off no matter how agents resolve their strategic confusion.

 

• "Correlation-Robust Auction Design," (with Wei He). NEW!​​
  • ​Supplemental Material.
  • Abstract: We study the design of auctions with limited statistical information about the joint distribution of the bidders' valuations. In particular, we consider an auctioneer who has an estimate of the marginal distribution of a generic bidder's valuation but does not have reliable information about the correlation structure. We analyze the performance of mechanisms in terms of revenue guarantee, that is, the greatest lower bound of revenue across all joint distributions that are consistent with the marginals. We show that a simple auction format, the second-price auction with no reserve price, is asymptotically optimal. Furthermore, for any finite number of bidders, we solve for the robustly optimal reserve price that generates the highest revenue guarantee among second-price auctions with reserve prices.​

 

• "Strategically Simple Mechanisms," (with Tilman Borgers).
  • ​Econometrica 87 (2019), 2003-2035.
  • Supplemental Material.

 

• "Equivalence of Stochastic and Deterministic Mechanisms," (with Yi-Chun Chen, Wei He, and Yeneng Sun).
  • Econometrica 87 (2019), 1367-1390.
  • ​​Supplemental Material.

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• ​"Revisiting the Foundations of Dominant-Strategy Mechanisms," (with Yi-Chun Chen).
  • Journal of Economic Theory 178 (2018), 294-317.

 

• "Efficient Dynamic Mechanisms with Interdependent Valuations," (with Wei He).
  • ​Games and Economic Behavior 97 (2016), 166-173.

Revealed Preference Analysis    

• "Coarse Revealed Preference," (with Gaoji Hu, John Quah, and Rui Tang).​

   

• ''The Revealed Preference Theory of Stable Matchings with One-Sided Preferences," (with Gaoji Hu and Rui Tang).​
  • Acceptance subject to minor revision, Games and Economic Behavior.

 

• "Every Random Choice Rule is Backwards-Induction Rationalizable," (with Rui Tang).​​
  • Games and Economic Behavior 104 (2017), 563–567.

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Epistemic Game Theory

• "Agreeing to Agree and Dutch Books," (with Yi-Chun Chen, Ehud Lehrer, Dov Samet, and Eran Shmaya).
  • ​Games and Economic Behavior 93 (2015), 108-116.​

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