Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/197734 
Year of Publication: 
2017
Series/Report no.: 
ISER Discussion Paper No. 1005
Publisher: 
Osaka University, Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER), Osaka
Abstract: 
This paper studies a model of mechanism design with transfers where agents' preferences need not be quasilinear. In such a model, (1) we characterize dominant strategy incentive compatible mechanisms using a monotonicity property; (2) we establish a revenue uniqueness result: for every dominant strategy implementable allocation rule, there is a unique payment rule that can implement it; and (3) we show that every dominant strategy incentive compatible, individually rational, and revenue-maximizing mechanism must charge zero transfer for the worst alternative (outside option). These results are applicable in a wide variety of problems (single object auction, multiple object auction, public good provision etc.) under suitable richness of type space. In particular, our results can be applied to models where preferences of agents are arbitrarily small perturbations of quasilinear preferences and illustrate the (non)-robustness of some of the classic results in mechanism design with quasilinearity. We show various applications of our results.
Subjects: 
incentive compatibility
individual rationality
monotonicity
non-quasilinear preferences
revenue equivalence
JEL: 
D82
D44
D40
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
680.85 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.