COWLES FOUNDATION FOR RESEARCH IN ECONOMICS
AT YALE UNIVERSITY

Box 208281
New Haven, CT 06520-8281

COWLES FOUNDATION DISCUSSION PAPER NO. 1818

Robust Mechanism Design: An Introduction

Dirk Bergemann and Stephen Morris

August 2011

This essay is the introduction for a collection of papers by the two of us on "Robust Mechanism Design" to be published by World Scientific Publishing. The appendix of this essay lists the chapters of the book.

The objective of this introductory essay is to provide the reader with an overview of the research agenda pursued in the collected papers. The introduction selectively presents the main results of the papers, and attempts to illustrate many of them in terms of a common and canonical example, the single unit auction with interdependent values.

In addition, we include an extended discussion about the role of alternative assumptions about type spaces in our work and the literature, in order to explain the common logic of the informational robustness approach that unifies the work in this volume.

Keywords: Mechanism design, Robust mechanism design, Common knowledge, Universal type space, Interim equilibrium, Ex post equilibrium, Dominant strategies, Rationalizability, Partial implementation, Full implementation, Robust implementation

JEL Classification: C79, D82