Implementation with a sympathizer

Ozan Altuğ Altun, Mehmet Barlo and Nuh Aygün Dalkıran

Mathematical Social Sciences, 2023, vol. 121, issue C, 36-49

Abstract: We study Nash implementation under complete information with the distinctive feature that the planner knows neither individuals’ state-contingent preferences (payoff states) nor how they correspond to the states of the economy on which the social goal depends. Our main question is whether or not the planner can extract only the essential information about individuals’ underlying preferences and simultaneously implement the given social goal. Our setup is especially relevant when the planner cannot use mechanisms asking for the full revelation of the payoffs states due to privacy and political correctness concerns or non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements. In economic environments with at least three individuals, we show that the planner may Nash implement a social goal while extracting only the essential information about the payoff states from the society whenever this goal has standard monotonicity properties and one of the individuals whose identity is not necessarily known to the planner and the other individuals, is a sympathizer. Vaguely put, such an agent is inclined toward the truthful revelation of the essential information about how states of the economy are associated with individuals’ preferences, while he is not inclined to reveal the realized ‘true’ state of the economy. Then, in every Nash equilibrium of the mechanism we design, all individuals truthfully disclose the same essential information about the payoff states.

Keywords: Nash implementation; Privacy; Maskin monotonicity; Partial honesty; Behavioral implementation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165489622000919
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:matsoc:v:121:y:2023:i:c:p:36-49

DOI: 10.1016/j.mathsocsci.2022.12.002

Access Statistics for this article

Mathematical Social Sciences is currently edited by J.-F. Laslier

More articles in Mathematical Social Sciences from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().