Author : Ziwei Wang
Release : 2022
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Kind : eBook
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Book Synopsis Essays on Games with Incomplete Information by : Ziwei Wang

Download or read book Essays on Games with Incomplete Information written by Ziwei Wang. This book was released on 2022. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of game theory has advanced our understanding of strategic interactions and economic behaviors. In applications, we economists often use parsimonious game-theoretic models to help us make sharp predictions. However, these models are associated with strong, sometimes unwarranted, common knowledge assumptions about players' payoffs and information. In order to make our predictions realistic and reliable, we need to embed these models into larger and more comprehensive ones, and then perform analysis that are robust to the relaxation of common knowledge assumptions. This dissertation contains three chapters that study various game-theoretic frameworks with incomplete information and investigate the implications of weakened assumptions. The first chapter proposes a new notion of stability to study matching markets with one-sided incomplete information. A key contribution is to formulate a proper definition of uninformed agents' endogenous beliefs and a self-consistency condition on those beliefs. We define a criterion of stability for a given set of outcomes, and then iteratively apply this criterion to remove outcomes that cannot be deemed stable. Our solution concept, the set of rationalizable stable outcomes, is the limit of this procedure. We prove the existence of rationalizable stable outcomes using a fixed-point characterization. We then provide two additional characterizations of our solution concept. The first characterization links the non-equilibrium approach we pursue to the equilibrium approach pioneered by Liu (2020). The second one reveals the epistemic assumptions implicit in the iterative definition. In the second chapter, we study standard auctions and compare their minimum expected revenues across all information structures. We show that, for a given symmetric common prior of values among bidders, if the seller is uncertain about the correct model of bidders' interim beliefs and evaluates her expected revenue by the worst-case scenario, the all-pay auction performs weakly worse than does the first-price auction. Specifically, we first provide a revenue equivalence result of standard auction formats under the "worst-case" information structure constructed in Bergemann et al. (2017a), which implies that the minimum expected revenue of the all-pay auction never exceeds that of a first-price auction. We then construct an example to illustrate that the all-pay auction can generate strictly lower expected revenue in some cases. The third chapter studies predictions that are robust against higher order payoff uncertainty in dynamic games. Common knowledge among players is captured by a preference-information structure, while a type space is used as a concise model of players' initial beliefs. We formulate an interim version of extensive form rationalizability (EFR) and use this solution concept as the starting point of our robustness analysis. Employing a collection-based approach, we provide conditions that fully characterize (i) what refinements of EFR are robust, (ii) when a Structure Theorem (Weinstein and Yildiz, 2007) of EFR holds, and (iii) when the prediction of EFR is generically unique. We then apply these results to study robust refinements of EFR when there is higher order uncertainty about privacy of information or about observability of actions. These applications demonstrate the power of our results and generate interesting observations in dynamic environments.