Informationally Simple Incentives
研究在代理人可花费成本获取自己及他人偏好信息的机制设计问题，提出信息简洁性概念，即代理人无动机了解他人偏好，并证明该性质等价于一个排除大多数有意义机制的分离条件。
We consider a mechanism design setting in which agents can acquire costly information on their preferences as well as others’. A mechanism is informationally simple if agents have no incentive to learn about others’ preferences. This property is of interest for two reasons. First, it is a necessary condition for the existence of dominant-strategy equilibria in the extended game. Second, this endogenizes an “independent-private-value” property of the interim information structure. We show that, generically, a mechanism is informationally simple if and only if it satisfies a separability condition that rules out most economically meaningful mechanisms.