Approximating Large Contests and other Auction-Like Games: a Mechanism Design Approach

Project: Research project

Project Details

Description

The proposal concerns large games, with an emphasis on certain types of auctions. The main idea is that the equilibria of such auction-like games converge, as the number of players grows, to the outcomes of some incentive-compatible and individually rational single-agent mechanisms. This enables the use of tools developed for mechanism design to approximate and study the equilibria of auction-like games with a large number of players. The authors have pursued this idea to study contests with many, possibly heterogeneous, prizes and players that include many existing contest models as special cases. They plan to pursue the same idea to study other auction-like games, such as uniform price auctions and double auctions. The tractable approximation of equilibria will enable the authors to compare welfare properties of various contest specifications and perform various comparative statics. The approach may also be useful for deriving new results in mechanism design.
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date9/1/138/31/17

Funding

  • National Science Foundation (SES-1325968)

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