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Foundations of mechanism design: A tutorial Part 1-Key concepts and classical results

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Abstract

Mechanism design, an important tool in microeconomics, has found widespread applications in modelling and solving decentralized design problems in many branches of engineering, notably computer science, electronic commerce, and network economics. Mechanism design is concerned with settings where a social planner faces the problem of aggregating the announced preferences of multiple agents into a collective decision when the agents exhibit strategic behaviour. The objective of this paper is to provide a tutorial introduction to the foundations and key results in mechanism design theory. The paper is in two parts. Part 1 focuses on basic concepts and classical results which form the foundation of mechanism design theory. Part 2 presents key advanced concepts and deeper results in mechanism design.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IBM India Research Laboratory, Bangalore, 560 071, India

    Dinesh Garg

  2. Electronic Commerce Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, 560 012, India

    Y. Narahari & Sujit Gujar

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  1. Dinesh Garg
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  2. Y. Narahari
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  3. Sujit Gujar
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Correspondence to Y. Narahari.

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Garg, D., Narahari, Y. & Gujar, S. Foundations of mechanism design: A tutorial Part 1-Key concepts and classical results. Sadhana 33, 83–130 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12046-008-0008-3

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