UCLA

This dissertation studies how asymmetric information between economic agents interacts with their incentive in dynamic games and mechanism design. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 study this in mechanism design, especially focusing on robustness of mechanisms when a mechanism designer’s knowledge on agents’ belief and higher order beliefs is not perfect. In Chapter 1 we introduce a novel robustness notion into mechanism design, which we term confident implementation; and characterize confidently implementable social choice correspondences. In Chapter 2, we introduce another robust notion, p-dominant implementation where p ∈ [0, 1]N and N ∈ N is the number of agents, and fully characterize p-dominant implementable allocations in the quasilinear environment. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 are related in the following way: for some range of p, a p-dominant implementable social choice correspondence is confidently implementable.

In Chapter 3, we study information disclosure problem to manage reputation. To study this, we consider a repeated game in which there are a long-run player and a stream of short-run players; and the long-run player has private information about her type, which is either commitment or normal. We assume that the shot-run player only can observe the past K ∈ N periods of information disclosed by the long-run player. In this environment, we characterize the information disclosure behavior of the long-run player and also equilibrium dynamics whose shape critically depends on the prior.