Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: Mar, 1992, Volume 60, Issue 2

Correlated Information and Mecanism Design

https://doi.org/0012-9682(199203)60:2<395:CIAMD>2.0.CO;2-4
p. 395-421

Philip J. Reny, R. Preston McAfee

In most models of asymmetric information, possession of private information leads to rents for the possessors. This tends to induce mechanism designers to distort away from efficiency. We show that this is an artifact of the presumption that information is independently distributed. Rent extraction in a large class of mechanism design games is analyzed, and a necessary and sufficient condition for arbitrarily small rents to private information is provided. In addition, the two person bargaining game is shown to have an efficient solution under first order stochastic dominance and a hazard rate condition. Similar conditions lead to full rent extraction in Milgrom-Weber auctions.


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