Designing Economic Mechanisms - Hardcover

Hurwicz, Leonid; Reiter, Stanley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521836417 ISBN 13: 9780521836418

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2006

Synopsis

A mechanism is a mathematical structure that models institutions through which economic activity is guided and coordinated. There are many such institutions; markets are the most familiar ones. Lawmakers, administrators and officers of private companies create institutions in orders to achieve desired goals. They seek to do so in ways that economize on the resources needed to operate the institutions, and that provide incentives that induce the required behaviors. This book presents systematic procedures for designing mechanisms that achieve specified performance, and economize on the resources required to operate the mechanism, i.e., informationally efficient mechanisms. Our systematic design procedures are algorithms for designing informationally efficient mechanisms. Most of the book deals with these procedures of design. When there are finitely many environments to be dealt with, and there is a Nash-implementing mechanism, our algorithms can be used to make that mechanism into an informationally efficient one. Informationally efficient dominant strategy implementation is also studied.

About this title

Book Description:

This book presents methods for designing institutions that direct and coordinate economic activity to achieve specified goals. These methods design informationally efficient mechanisms; they can also be used to modify mechanisms that induce strategic behavior to achieve specified goals such that the modified mechanism retains the incentive properties of the original and is informationally efficient.

About the Author:

Leonid Hurwicz is Regents' Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. Internationally renowned for his pioneering research on economic theory, particularly in the areas of mechanism and institutional design and mathematical economics, he received the national Medal of Science in 1990. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Professor Hurwicz is a former President and Fellow of the Econometric Society. The recipient of six honorary doctorates, he serves on the editorial board of several journals and coedited and contributed to two collections for Cambridge University Press, Studies in Resource Allocation Processes (1978, with Kenneth Arrow) and Social Goals and Social Organization (1987, with David Schmeidler and Hugo Sonnenschein). His recent publications include papers in Economic Theory (2003, with Thomas Marschak), Review of Economic Design (2001, with Stanley Reiter), and Advances in Mathematical Economics (2003, with Marcel K. Richter).

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0521836417
• ISBN 13: 9780521836418
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 356