Strategyproofness-Exposing Mechanism Descriptions

Date: 

Friday, December 2, 2022, 1:00pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

SEC 1.413, and streamed via Zoom at: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/95184948637?pwd=bXBIc2U5MEZ0QmRUb01WQ0o0SXRCdz09

This Friday, 1pm-2pm in SEC 1.413, Clayton Thomas (Princeton) will be speaking in-person on:

Strategyproofness-Exposing Mechanism Descriptions

Abstract: A menu description defines a mechanism to player i in two steps. Step (1) uses the reports of other players to describe i’s menu: the set of i’s potential outcomes. Step (2) uses i’s report to select i’s favorite outcome from her menu. Can menu descriptions better expose strategyproofness, without sacrificing simplicity? We propose a new, simple menu description of Deferred Acceptance, the most popular strategyproof matching mechanism. We prove that—in contrast with other common matching mechanisms—this menu description must differ substantially from the corresponding traditional description, and that descriptions face a large formal tradeoff between conveying strategyproofness to player i and conveying the rest of the matching. We demonstrate, with a lab experiment on two simple mechanisms, the promise and challenges of menu descriptions.

Here is the Zoom link again for those who are not able to make it in-person:

https://harvard.zoom.us/j/95184948637?pwd=bXBIc2U5MEZ0QmRUb01WQ0o0SXRCdz09