Three Essays On Mechanism Design And Auctions

This dissertation consists of three essays in the theory of mechanism design under incomplete information. In the first essay, we analyze an implementation problem in which monetary transfers are feasible, valuations are interdependent and the set of available choices lies in a product space of lattices. This framework is general enough to subsume many interesting examples, including allocation problems with multiple objects. We identify a class of social choice rules which can be implemented in ex post equilibrium. We identify conditions under which ex post efficient social choice rules are implementable using monotone selection theory. The key conditions are extensions of the single crossing property and supermodularity. These conditions can be replaced with more tractable conditions in multiobject allocation problems with either two objects or two agents. I also show that the payments which implement monotone social decision rules coincide with the payments of (1) the classical Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism with private values, and (2) the generalized Vickrey auction introduced by Ausubel [1999] in multiunit allocation problems. The second essay generalizes the analysis of optimal (revenue maximizing) mechanism design for the seller of a single object introduced by Myerson [1981]. We consider a problem in which the seller has several heterogeneous objects and buyers' valuations depend on each other's private information. We analyze two nonnested environments in which incentive constraints can be replaced with more tractable monotonicity conditions. We establish conditions under which these monotonicity conditions can be ignored, and show that several earlier analyses of the optimal mechanism design problem can be unified and generalized. In particular, problems with two complementary goods in Levin [1997] and multiunit auction problems in Maskin and Riley [1989] and Branco [1996] are special cases. The third essay considers the problem of selling internet advertising slots to advertisers. Under suitable conditions, we solve for the payments imposed by an optimal mechanism and show that it can be decentralized via prices using a linear assignment approach. At every configuration of private information, optimal mechanism can be interpreted as a menu consisting of a price for every slot.

In this dissertation we address several open problems in the theory of mechanism design: (i) optimal mechanism design when agents collude; (ii) multidimensional mechanism design problem of the multiproduct monopolist; (iii) robust predictions of the relative revenue loss from the bidders' collusion in the optimal auctions.