Overview

The lectures intend to cover the following topics.

• Screening: mechanism design with one seller and one buyer. We will review the basic approach of Myerson, and look at the problem from different angles.

• Auction: mechanism design with one seller and multiple buyers. We will also discuss reduced form and Border’s theorem.

• Robust mechanism design (if time allowed). We will discuss some recent research on robust screening and some related problems.

Whenever possible, an optimization perspective to mechanism design will be emphasized. In this regard, a good knowledge of linear programming would be helpful.

Reference

The materials can mostly be found in the following three books.

• An Introduction to the Theory of Mechanism Design, by Tilman Borgers, Daniel Krahmer, and Roland Strausz. Oxford University Press. 2015.

• Auction Theory, by Vijay Krishna. Elsevier. 2010.

• Mechanism Design: A Linear Programming Approach, by Rakesh Vohra. Cambridge University Press. 2011.

Notes

• Lecture 1: Screening

• Lecture 2: Auction