Keeping the Agents in the Dark: Competing Mechanisms, Private Disclosures, and the Revelation Principle

Andrea Attar, Eloisa Campioni, Thomas Mariotti and Alessandro Pavan

No 11991, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We study the design of market information in competing-mechanism games. We identify a new dimension, private disclosures, whereby the principals asymmetrically inform the agents of how their mechanisms operate. We show that private disclosures have two important effects. First, they can raise a principal's payoff guarantee against her competitors' threats. Second, they can support equilibrium outcomes and payoffs that cannot be supported with standard mechanisms. These results call for a novel approach to competing mechanisms, which we develop to identify a canonical game and a canonical class of equilibria, thereby establishing a new revelation principle for this class of environments.

Keywords: incomplete information; competing mechanisms; private disclosures; revelation principle (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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