Perfect concrete implementation of arbitrary mechanisms: a quick summary of joint work with Sergei Izmalkov and Matt Lepinski

Abstract

Privacy and trust affect our everyday thinking and, in particular, the way we approach a concrete game. Accordingly, we hope that a rigorous treatment of privacy and trust will become integral part of mechanism design. As of now, the field has been very successful in finding many ingenious mechanisms as solutions to a variety of problems. But these mechanisms are theoretical constructions and not enough attention has been devoted to their concrete implementation. Indeed, It should be appreciated that the outcome function of a simple normal-form mechanism does not spontaneously evaluate itself on the "messages" that the players have selected in "their own minds." To be practically useful in a real strategic setting, any mechanism M, whether of normal or extensive form, must be concretely implemented. But then, in such concrete implementations, issues of privacy and trust may arise so as to undermine the valuable theoretical properties of M.