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STICERD Economic Theory Seminars

Keeping the Agents in the Dark: Private Disclosures in Competing Mechanisms

Thomas Mariotti (Toulouse School of Economics), joint with Andrea Attar, Eloisa Campioni and Alessandro Pavan

Thursday 19 May 2022 15:30 - 17:00

Many of our seminars and public events this year will continue as in person or as hybrid (online and in person) events. Please check our website listings and Twitter feed @STICERD_LSE for updates.

Unless otherwise specified, in-person seminars are open to the public. Please ensure you have informed the event contact as early as possible.

Those unable to join the seminars in-person are welcome to participate via zoom if the event is hybrid.


About this event

We study competing-mechanism games, in which several principals contract with several privately informed agents. We show that enabling the principals to engage into private disclosures—whereby a principal sends to the agents contractible private signals about how her final decision will respond to the agents’ messages—can significantly affect the predictions of such games. Our first result is that equilibrium outcomes and payoffs of games without private disclosures may not be supported when private disclosures are allowed for. This challenges the robustness of the folk theorems `a la Yamashita (2010). Our second result is that allowing for private disclosures may generate equilibrium outcomes and payoffs that cannot be supported in any game without private disclosures, no matter how rich the message spaces are. This challenges the canonicity of the universal mechanisms of Epstein and Peters (1999). Together, these findings call for a novel approach to the analysis of competing-mechanism games.

Economic Theory Seminars are held on Thursdays in term time at 15:30-17:00, both ONLINE and IN PERSON in SAL 3.05.

Seminar organisers: Dr Andrew Ellis and Dr Christopher Sandmann.

For further information please contact Sadia Ali: s.ali43@lse.ac.uk.

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