An Introduction to Robust Mechanism Design

Dirk Bergemann
2013 Foundations and Trends in Microeconomics  
This essay provides an introduction to our recent work on robust mechanism design. The objective is to provide an overview of the research agenda and its results. We present the main results and illustrate many of them in terms of a common and canonical example, the single unit auction with interdependent values. In addition, we provide an extended discussion about the role of alternative assumptions about type spaces in our work, and the literature at large, in order to explain * We would like
more » ... to thank Eric Maskin for inviting us to publish the work covered in this survey in a collection of the World Scientific Series in Economic Theory edited by Eric. An early version of this essay appeared as an introduction in Bergemann and Morris (2012b). We would like to thank our co-authors Hanming Fang, Moritz Meyer-ter-Vehn, Karl Schlag, Satoru Takahashi and Olivier Tercieux in this research agenda and Nemanja Antic, Andreas Blume, Tilman Borgers, Jacques Cremer, Moritz Meyer-ter-Vehn, Phil Reny and Olivier Tercieux for comments on this essay. We had the opportunity to deliver the present material at a number of invited lectures, notably at Boston University, Northwestern University and the European and North American Econometric Society Meetings and a set of slides which cover and accompany this essay can be found at http://dirkbergemann. commons.yale.edu/files/2010/12/robustmechanismdesign1.pdf. the common logic of the informational robustness approach that unifies the work.
doi:10.1561/0700000057 fatcat:qferczhsqvgbhfpkm4eiaycp5e