Dirk Bergemann

This volume brings together the collected contributions of Dirk Bergemann and Juuso Välimäki, on the theme of learning, experimentation and intertemporal incentives, spanning over two decades of thought (1996 to 2019). The collection starts with a comprehensive introduction to the recent developments of dynamic mechanism design with a primary focus on the quasilinear case. The authors describe socially optimal and revenue optimal dynamic mechanism. They cover models of sequential screening and revenue maximizing auctions with dynamically changing bidder types, and also discuss models of information management where the mechanism designer can control (at least partially) the stochastic process governing the agent's types. Consolidating the research agenda on learning, experimentation, and dynamic mechanism design, which has been prominent in the area of economic theory, the authors present for the first time the main results of the research agenda in this volume.

An Introduction to Robust Mechanism Design brings together and presents a number of results on the theme of robust mechanism design and robust implementation that the authors have been working on in the past decade. This work examines the implications of relaxing the strong informational assumptions that drive much of the mechanism design literature. The objective is to provide the reader with an overview of the research agenda and present the main results of this research by illustrating it in terms of a common and canonical example – the single unit auction with interdependent values. In addition, the monograph includes an extended discussion on the role of alternative assumptions about type spaces in the authors' work. It also discusses the literature to explain the common logic of the informational robustness approach that unifies the work that is surveyed in this monograph.

Foreword by Eric Maskin (Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2007)This volume brings together the collected contributions on the theme of robust mechanism design and robust implementation that Dirk Bergemann and Stephen Morris have been working on for the past decade. The collection is preceded by a comprehensive introductory essay, specifically written for this volume with the aim of providing the readers 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, namely a single unit auction with interdependent values. It is our hope that the use of this example facilitates the presentation of the results and that it brings the main insights within the context of an important economic mechanism, namely the generalized second price auction.