Communication Effects in Economic Environments

Опубликовано 6 сентября 2016, 6:13

In many game-theoretic settings, the communication between the participants is restricted to specific patterns. These communication patterns may have a crucial effect on the performance of the game. We demonstrate such phenomena in two auction models: (1) We first show that single-item auctions can be close to optimal even with severe restrictions on the amount of information that each bidder may reveal. We study similar questions also in a general mechanism-design framework, and apply our general results to other specific environments, like signaling games and routing in faulty networks. (2) We also show that multi-item (combinatorial) auctions, which are restricted to using the standard practice of ascending prices, have severe limitations. The talk is based on joint works with Noam Nisan, Ilya Segal and Michal Feldman.