Keeping the Agents in the Dark: Private Disclosures in Competing Mechanism s ”, with Andrea Attar, Thomas Mariotti, and Ales sandro Pavan
Abstract:
We study games in which several principals contract with several privately-informed agents. We show that enabling the principals to engage in contractible private disclosures (by sending privat e signals to the agents about how the mechanisms will respond to the agents ’ messages) can significantly affect the predictions of such games. Our fir st result shows that equilibrium outcomes and payoffs of games without priv ate disclosures need not be sustainable when private disclosures are allowe d. The result thus challenges the robustness of the "folk theorems" of Yama shita (2010) and Peters and Troncoso-Valverde (2013). Our second result sho ws that private disclosures may generate equilibrium outcomes that cannot b e supported in any game without private disclosures, no matter the richness of the message spaces and the availability of public randomizing devices. The result thus challenges the canonicity of the universal mechanisms of Ep stein and Peters (1999). These findings call for a novel approach to the an alysis of competing-mechanism games.
DTSTAMP:20260711T061204Z DTSTART:20211129T163000Z DTEND:20211129T180000Z SEQUENCE:0 TRANSP:OPAQUE END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR