“jMID-vol4(1)-01” — 2019/11/6 — 14:56 — page i — #1 Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design Volume 4, Issue 1 Zaifu Yang, Tommy Andersson, Vince Crawford, David Martimort, Paul Schweinzer University of York, University of Klagenfurt, Southwestern University of Economics and Finance, 2019 “jMID-vol4(1)-01” — 2019/11/6 — 14:56 — page ii — #2 Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design, 4(1), 2019, ii Editorial board Editor Zaifu Yang, University of York, UK Co-editors Tommy Andersson, Lund University, Sweden Vincent Crawford, University of Oxford, UK David Martimort, Paris School of Economics, France Paul Schweinzer, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria Associate Editors Elizabeth Baldwin, University of Oxford, UK Peter Biro, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary Randall Calvert, Washington University in St. Louis, USA Youngsub Chun, Seoul National University, South Korea Kim-Sau Chung, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong Michael Suk-Young Chwe, University of California, Los Angeles, USA Xiaotie Deng, Peking University, China Lars Ehlers, Université de Montréal, Canada Aytek Erdil, University of Cambridge, UK Robert Evans, University of Cambridge, UK Tamás Fleiner, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary Alex Gershkov, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel Paul Goldberg, University of Oxford, UK Claus-Jochen Haake, Universität Paderborn, Germany John Hatfield, University of Texas at Austin, USA Paul Healy, Ohio State University, USA Jean-Jacques Herings, Maastricht University, Netherlands Sergei Izmalkov, New Economic School, Russia Ian Jewitt, University of Oxford, UK Yuichiro Kamada, University of California, Berkeley, USA Onur Kesten, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Bettina Klaus, University of Lausanne, Switzerland Flip Klijn, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain Scott Kominers, Harvard University, USA Fuhito Kojima, Stanford University, USA Gleb Koshevoy, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia Jorgen Kratz, University of York, UK Dinard van der Laan, Tinbergen Institute, Netherlands Jingfeng Lu, National University of Singapore, Singapore Jinpeng Ma, Rutgers University, USA David Manlove, University of Glasgow, UK Debasis Mishra, Indian Statistical Institute, India Rudolf Müller, Maastricht University, Netherlands Tymofiy Mylovanov, University of Pittsburgh, USA “jMID-vol4(1)-01” — 2019/11/6 — 14:56 — page iii — #3 Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design, 4(1), 2019, iii Associate Editors (continued) Sérgio Parreiras, University of North Carolina, USA Frank Riedel, Universität Bielefeld, Germany József Sákovics, University of Edinburgh, UK Michael Schwarz, Google Research, USA Ella Segev, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel Jay Sethuraman, Columbia University, USA Akiyoshi Shioura, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan Ning Sun, Nanjing Audit University, China Alex Teytelboym, University of Oxford, UK Jacco Thijssen, University of York, UK Guoqiang Tian, Texas A&M University, USA Walter Trockel, Universität Bielefeld, Germany Utku Ünver, Boston College, USA James Walker, University of Reading, UK David Wettstein, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel Takuro Yamashita, Toulouse School of Economics, France Charles Zheng, Western University, Canada Published by The Society for the Promotion of Mechanism and Institution Design Editorial office, Centre for Mechanism and Institution Design University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD United Kingdom http://www.mechanism-design.org ISSN: 2399-844X (Print), 2399-8458 (Online), DOI: 10.22574/jmid The founding institutional members are University of York, UK Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria Southwestern University of Economics and Finance, China. Cover & Logo Artwork @ Jasmine Yang LATEX Editor & Journal Design @ Paul Schweinzer (using ‘confproc’) LATEX Editorial Assistants @ Theresa Marchetti & Daniel Rehsmann Printed in York and Klagenfurt by the Centre for Mechanism and Institution Design “jMID-vol4(1)-01” — 2019/11/6 — 14:56 — page iv — #4 Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design, 4(1), 2019, iv A Letter from the Editor or the current issue, I would like to report to our readers the following important items F concerning the Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design and its Society for the Promotion of Mechanism and Institution Design. Our Society as a registered UK charity body (no. 1174289), an independent learned society, will hold its second Conference on Mechanism and Institution Design at the Alpen-Adria- University of Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria, on Thursday-Saturday, 11th-13th June 2020. The confirmed keynote speakers are Professors Pierpaolo Battigalli (Bocconi University), Jo- hannes Hörner (Yale University), and Benny Moldovanu (University of Bonn). The organiser is Professor Paul Schweinzer of the Alpen-Adria-University of Klagenfurt. Up to date confer- ence information can be found at our Society website http://www.mechanism-design. org/news.php. By the end of this year our colleagues on the editorial board Sayantan Ghosal, David Pérz- Castrillo, Neil Rankin, and Arunava Sen will complete their term. We wish to thank them for their excellent service, advice and support during the formative years of the Journal. At the same time, we warmly welcome four outstanding colleagues to join our editorial board from January 2020. They are Youngsub Chun of Seoul National University, Flip Klijn of Uni- versitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Jorgen Kratz of University of York, and Takuro Yamashita of Toulouse School of Economics. We are looking forward to working with them towards further advancement of the Journal. As our Journal will enter its fifth year in 2020 and the number of submissions is growing, we may start to gradually increase the issues of each volume. This, however, does not mean we will sacrifice the quality of published articles. We will always remain true to our guid- ing principle: To publish original and innovative high quality research works in the field of mechanism and institution design and to provide the best possible services to the profession for the public interest. The Journal is totally free of charge to the authors (no submission fee, no membership fee, and no publication fee) and freely open to everyone on the Internet. Our Journal, however, does rely on donations and has received generous financial support. We firmly believe that open access journals like ours are the future of scholarly publishing. Your support – whether in the form of donation, submission or reviewing – will be always appreciated and play a vital role in keeping our vision alive and helping the Journal thrive. Zaifu Yang, York, 29th October, 2019 “jMID-vol4(1)-01” — 2019/11/6 — 14:56 — page 1 — #5 “p˙01” — 2019/11/4 — 16:17 — page 1 — #1 Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design ISSN: 2399-844X (Print), 2399-8458 (Online) DOI:10.22574/jmid.2019.11.001 EFFICIENT AND DOMINANCE SOLVABLE AUCTIONS WITH INTERDEPENDENT VALUATIONS Kim-Sau Chung Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong [email protected] Jeffrey C. Ely Northwestern University, U.S.A. [email protected] ABSTRACT In auction environments in which agents have private values, the Vickrey auction induces agents to truthfully reveal their preferences and selects the efficient allocation accordingly. When the agents’ valuations are interdepen- dent, various generalizations of the Vickrey auction have been found which provide incentives for truthful revelation of all private information and preserve efficiency. However, these mechanisms generally do not provide the bidders with dominant strategies. The existing literature has therefore used a stronger equilibrium solution concept. In this paper we show that while the general- ized VCG mechanism admits a multiplicity of equilibria, many of which are inefficient. We give conditions under which the efficiency equilibrium is the unique outcome of iterative elimination of ex post weakly dominated strate- gies. With two bidders, the standard single-crossing condition is sufficient. With more than two bidders, we show by example that a strengthening of the single-crossing condition is necessary. Keywords: Generalized VCG mechanism, iterative elimination of ex post weakly dominated strategies. JEL Classification Numbers: D44, D82. This paper was first circulated in 2000. The literature has since grown much bigger than is reflected in our references. We apologize for not being able to do justice to this subsequent literature. We thank Dirk Bergemann, Eddie Dekel, Stephen Morris, and Asher Wolinsky for their continual interest in this old paper, and Zaifu Yang for inviting us to submit it to this Journal. All errors are ours. Copyright c Kim-Sau Chung, Jeffrey C. Ely / 4(1), 2019,1–38. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License 3.0, http://creativecommons.org. “jMID-vol4(1)-01” — 2019/11/6 — 14:56 — page 2 — #6 “p˙01” — 2019/11/4 — 16:17 — page 2 — #2 2 Efficient and Dominance Solvable Auctions 1. INTRODUCTION he Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism is among the pillars of mechanism T design and implementation theory. In its simplest form, the Vickrey auction is a selling mechanism under which bidders with private valuations for a single object have a dominant strategy to submit a bid equal to their valuation, thereby ensuring that the auction will be won by the bidder whose valuation is the highest. More generally, in social choice environments in which agents have private values (they have all the information that is relevant to determine their preferences), and utilities are quasi-linear in money, the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG)