Talk:Mechanism design

Recent Change
I think its inaccurate to say that mechanism deisgn was pioneered in during the cold war era- The fact that it was the cold war was irrelevant. It didn't take the cold war to spur on mechanism design, it took game theory and the study of auctions, and advances in the study of Bayesian games.

Also, the second sentence is clunky, and restates things in the opening paragraph. Plus it has misspellings. I am reverting it. DOD 23:47, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Including Reference to Economics
I'm not sure I agree that it needs to be pointed out that Mechanism Design is a subfield of both Game Theory and Economics. There are Computer Science People, and electrical engineering people, and Math people doing Mechanism design without more than a passing reference to economics, and really, there is no Mechanism Design without Game Theory, while there is Economics without either Game Theory or Mechansim design. The subfield of Mechanism Design is contained entirely within Game Theory, which is itself only partially within economics. So I think the change is superfluous. And besides the game theory stub at the bottom makes clear where Mechanism Design falls. So can you give a good reason that the change should stand? I can see why a stub might be added, but I don't think the content of the article needs the repetition. DOD 19:25, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Pyat rublei 1997.jpg
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BetacommandBot 11:30, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Actual "howto"?
The article is missing the actual description of how to implement mechanism design. It's just a meta-description. after reading it, i know why you want to use mechanism design, but i still know nothing about "what to do (exactly), when you do mechanism design". There's not even a link to such a paper. :(

Could someone who actually knows something about the topic add real information to the text? :)

Some info
I don't actually know something about the topic, but I share enough of your frustration to spend a few minutes with Google, given that the Nobel Prize in economics was awarded for this work just a few days ago. I am trying to include only those links that are significantly more informative than recent news stories. Many of these are college/university courses where the lecture notes are available online. I am doing this in haste right now, but maybe I'll get energetic later, actually read some of that stuff, and try to put together a condensed version of the basic ideas. -- WillWare 11:45, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
 * http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~parkes/pubs/ch2.pdf
 * http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~parkes/mechdesign.html
 * http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2002/HPL-2002-321.pdf
 * http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/10/15/midday1/?rsssource=1
 * http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-972Spring-2005/CourseHome/
 * http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/hermalin/econ206.html
 * http://www.cs.duke.edu/courses/fall06/cps296.2/

It turns out there is an hour-long Google tech talk about mechanism design, by a Harvard economics professor named Al Roth. This is likely to have some good tutorial material on how mechanism design works. At the moment my network connection is a bit too strained for video, but the first 75 seconds look promising. -- WillWare 16:22, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

I don't know what I was thinking. That tech talk was about MARKET design. Here is one about MECHANISM design, given by Noam Nisan of Google Tel-Aviv and previously from academia. -- WillWare 20:03, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

Missing Content
The content under "See Also" on the main page points to a Google page that is unavailable. This may be temporary, but perhaps someone might check (someone might be me...) in a few days to see if it is back or not. Bob Herrick 21:58, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Removal of Robotics Stub
I saw that User:Masterpiece2000 removed the stub for robotics on this article. I added it back because using markets and mechanism design is actually an emerging practice in multi-robot coordination. Here are a few people I know off the top of my head who are working in this area and have at least a couple papers (that I have read) on using either markets or mechanism design in multi-robot systems: Maria Gini, Sven Koenig, Michail Lagoudakis, Brian Gerkey, and Ruggiero Cavallo. I looked and saw that User:Jamesontai had added this tag, and on his page he mentions working on robotics and "spatial systems", but he is also in Mechanical engineering, so I am not sure whether or not he knew what mechanism design was when he put the tag there, but I'd certainly argue for it, as it has applications in robotics. I added it as low priority, as right now it is not widely used yet, but is an active area of research. Halcyonhazard (talk) 05:53, 14 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Mechanism design has applications in robotics? I will be very surprised if that's true. I don't know much about robotics, but I know about economics. If it has applications in robotics, and if the reliable sources say so, it can be a part of WikiProject Robotics. I will do some research. Masterpiece2000   ( talk ) 14:00, 14 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Here is a paper that is pretty obvious of the use of mechanism design in robotics: Halcyonhazard (talk) 19:55, 14 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Interesting paper. I will do some more research. Masterpiece2000   ( talk ) 03:18, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Values discussion missing?
Mechanisim design appears to be an attempt at social engineering from above by those who claim to know best. Isn't this communism? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 149.32.192.33 (talk) 13:58, 14 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Mechanism design is applicable to any system where you have self-interested rational agents and at least one agent has at least rudimentary control over some part of the interactions. Mechanism design is governance, not communism.  It is applicable to nearly any type of economic regime including communism and capitalism.  You could even argue that the anarcho-capitalism employs mechanism design in the decision to limit centrally enforced rules.  From a USA perspective, all of the decisions made by  the Fed and the SEC involve mechanism design (whether or not the mathematical treatment of mechanism design is actually used in their decisions is another matter, however, in many situations the problem may be intractable or you don't have enough information).  Decisions and legislation of how to treat and punish criminals in order to arrive at desired social norms is also an application of mechanism design.  As outlined in the design goals section of the article, no market system (nor voting system) is perfect because it is mathematically impossible to achieve all of the desiderata.  This does not mean that markets or democracy are bad -- they are better than all of the known alternatives -- it just means there are always trade-offs that must be made, just like in the project triangle in engineering.  For example, the restrictions on insider trading is a decision involving markets based out of mechanism design.  Halcyonhazard (talk) 20:12, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Formal notation
If there is going to be a definition in formal notation, then the terms should all be defined. For example, in:
 * the player will pick an action $$s_i(t_i) \in A_i$$, where $$A_i$$ is the set of possible actions for player $$i$$ offered by the mechanism... Each player has utility $$u_i:T_i \times O \rightarrow {\mathbb R}$$, where $$O$$ is the outcome generated by the mechanism.

there is no clue, for instance, what $$s$$ is - is "s" a strategy applied to a player's "type", that gives rise to an action? And what is $${\mathbb R}$$? This section needs work. It's too long (or not long enough) since I looked at formal methods and pure maths. - Paul (talk) 21:50, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

It isn't clear what theta_-i means or s_-i or u_i mean. If these were explained, then the section would be much clearer —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.106.167.25 (talk) 04:08, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

Expansion
This article doesn't say much about the work of Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin, Roger Myerson, Stanley Reiter, and other pioneers of mechanism design. Lots of work is required. I believe this article can achieve GA status. Masterpiece2000  ( talk ) 14:15, 14 August 2008 (UTC)


 * This article has a lot of issues, from correctness to organization to missing information. Mct mht (talk) 16:22, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Minor error in one sentence
The following sentence in this wiki:

Due to the IR condition it has to give every type enough a good enough deal to induce participation.

Should be:

Due to the IR condition it has to give every type a good enough deal to induce participation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:480:610:40:217:31FF:FEEA:AC13 (talk) 14:38, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Corrected. Thank you for the input. - DutchTreat (talk) 23:03, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Separate Mechanism Design and Market Design to two separate articles
Could we start a new article for Market Design? This requires comment from someone more knowledgeable than me, but I don't believe the two are the same; Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley won the Nobel in economics in 2012 for their fundamental contributions to Market Design, but Roth isn't even mentioned in the article, and Shapley is only linked externally, when he co-authored one of market design's most famous problems. Please consider this separation!

Welcome back to Mechanism Design!
Thank you for your pong to my {ping}  While doing a bit of research for a plain english lead to lead into the technical lead, I was most influenced by this 6/14 keynote by Eric Maskin at the 2014 Warwick Economics Summit. Thought it might be a good idea for us to dump our references here, then cite them into the Article as warranted, so here's a start. Thanks again, and Mabuhay! - Loretta/LeoRomero (talk) 10:47, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Dr. Said's comment on this article
Dr. Said has reviewed this Wikipedia page, and provided us with the following comments to improve its quality:

"The technical content appears generally correct; however, the article could be a bit more careful in the discussion of transfers. Generally speaking, the foundations of mechanism design rely on the social choice function (which might, but need not, involve the allocation of goods or the transfer of funds). Indeed, there exits a large literature on implementation using simple abstract social choice functions, and there is also a large literature on mechanisms without money.

In addition, things like Ironing don't necessarily belong in the general mechanism design article -- and certainly not with a proof."

We hope Wikipedians on this talk page can take advantage of these comments and improve the quality of the article accordingly.

Dr. Said has published scholarly research which seems to be relevant to this Wikipedia article:


 * Reference : Rahul Deb & Maher Said, 2013. "Dynamic Screening with Limited Commitment," Working Papers tecipa-485, University of Toronto, Department of Economics.

ExpertIdeasBot (talk) 13:26, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

Dr. Moldovanu's comment on this article
Dr. Moldovanu has reviewed this Wikipedia page, and provided us with the following comments to improve its quality:

"The article contains lots of material and some of the main results in the field, but it is pretty confused and confusing. There are lots of inaccurate statements . I doubt that uninitiated readers can make much sense of it. Thus, my recommendation is to ask some expert to write a new ( possibly shorter but accurate) article"

We hope Wikipedians on this talk page can take advantage of these comments and improve the quality of the article accordingly.

We believe Dr. Moldovanu has expertise on the topic of this article, since he has published relevant scholarly research:


 * Reference : Alex Gershkov & Jacob Goeree & Alexey Kushnir & Benny Moldovanu & Xianwen Shi, 2012. "On the Equivalence of Bayesian and Dominant Strategy Implementation," Working Papers tecipa-445, University of Toronto, Department of Economics.

ExpertIdeasBot (talk) 15:55, 24 August 2016 (UTC)