Mechanism design with maxmin agents: Theory and an application to bilateral trade
研究了当代理人是最大最小化期望效用最大化者时的机制设计，给出了社会选择规则可实施的必要条件，并应用于Myerson和Satterthwaite的双边贸易问题，刻画了有效贸易可能实现的条件及简单拍卖格式。
This paper studies mechanism design when agents are maxmin expected utility maximizers. A first result gives a general necessary condition for a social choice rule to be implementable. The condition combines an inequality version of the standard envelope characterization of payoffs in quasilinear environments with an approach for relating agents' maxmin expected utilities to their objective expected utilities under any common prior. The condition is then applied to give an exact characterization of when efficient trade is possible in the bilateral trading problem of Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983), under the assumption that agents know little beyond each other's expected valuation of the good (which is the information structure that emerges when agents are uncertainty about each other's ability to acquire information). Whenever efficient trade is possible, it may be implemented by a relatively simple double auction format. Sometimes, an extremely simple reference price rule can also implement efficient trade.