Research
Research
My research develops an institutional approach to mechanism design. It studies how property rights, decentralized bargaining, and informational constraints shape what can and cannot be achieved by economic institutions. More specifically, I revisit canonical impossibility results such as Myerson–Satterthwaite in bilateral trade and Green–Laffont in public good provision, asking whether their force depends not only on private information, but also on the way standard mechanism design centralizes the determination of surplus.
A central idea in this research is that many classical mechanisms embed a strong form of institutional authority: they do not merely aggregate information, but directly determine the final allocation and payoff structure. This can blur the boundary between incentive provision and the exercise of property rights, and may itself generate the strategic tensions that appear as impossibility results. My work studies what becomes possible when these elements are separated more carefully.
Overall, this research aims to reposition mechanism design on a more explicitly institutional foundation. Rather than treating institutions as a neutral background for incentive design, I study how the allocation of decision rights, the boundaries of information, and the locus of surplus determination jointly determine implementability, efficiency, and incentive compatibility.
This paper reexamines the relation between the Myerson-Satterthwaite theorem and the Coase theorem in bilateral trade with private information. It argues that the inefficiency identified by the Myerson-Satterthwaite theorem does not stem from private information per se, but from a deterministic allocation rule that centralizes authority over surplus division. Such centralization generates a strategic externality that underlies the impossibility result.
The paper constructs a mechanism that separates information communication from surplus determination by conveying derived information while preserving decentralized price negotiation. The mechanism achieves incentive compatibility without outside subsidies and implements ex post efficient meeting assignments. The analysis reconciles Coasean bargaining with private information and expands the domain of mechanism design to institutional environments with decentralized authority and probabilistic indeterminacy within a Bayesian framework.
Conference Presentation: EWMES (Dec 2025, Cyprus), CSW-AMES (Jan 2026, Abu Dhabi), NASM 2026 (June, Atlanta, USA, forthcoming)