Date of Submission

3-28-1999

Date of Award

3-28-2000

Institute Name (Publisher)

Indian Statistical Institute

Document Type

Doctoral Thesis

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Subject Name

Quantitative Economics

Department

Economics and Planning Unit (EPU-Delhi)

Supervisor

Sen, Arunava (EPU-Delhi; ISI)

Abstract (Summary of the Work)

The theory of mechanism design originated in the mid 1930s with the work of Lange[27], Lerner (28] and Hayek [20] on market socialism'. Further regular was added to their ideas by Arrow and Hurwicz (1). Hurwicz extended them to the general problem of mechanism design. An important aspect of mechanism design is asymmetric information. Information asymmetry typically imposes constraints on the goals which can be attained. For example. in the classic pure public goods problem, mechanisms that achieve truthful revelation of private information are Pareto sub-optimal i.e. these mechanisms lead to a welfare loss (see Hurwicz [24]). When can mechanism design lead to no welfare loss is addressed here. The question that we address in the three essays in this thesis is the following: Can we identify decision problems for which mechanisms can be designed where information shortages and asymmetries do not impose any welfare loss. In other words, do there exists ;interesting; incentive problems where the ;first best; is attainable? We provide a broadly affirmative answer to this question. We begin by discussing some theoretical results on implementation relevant for this work. We also give a brief sketch of the specific problems to be addressed in the next few chapters.

Comments

ProQuest Collection ID: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqm&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:28842969

Control Number

ISILib-TH181

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

DOI

http://dspace.isical.ac.in:8080/jspui/handle/10263/2146

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