This book is meant for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of economics who have a good understanding of game theory.

What is the best auctioning an asset? How should a group of people organise themselves to ensure the best provision of public goods? How should exchanges be organised? These questions are the subject of the economic theory of mechanism design. Tilman Börgers' book presents this theory carefully and rigorously. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students of economics will find an exposition of the classic theory of mechanism design, followed by chapters that take the reader to the frontiers of current research in the area.

It is impossible to understand modern economics without knowledge of the basic tools of gametheory and mechanism design. This book provides a graduate-level introduction to the economic modeling of strategic behavior. The goal is to teach Economics doctoral students the tools of game theory and mechanism design that all economists should know.

What is the best way to auction an asset? How should a group of people organize themselves to ensure the best provision of public goods? How should exchanges be organized? In An Introduction to the Theory of Mechanism Design, Tilman Borgers addresses these questions and more through an exploration of the economic theory of mechanism design. Mechanism design is reverse game theory. Whereas game theory takes the rules of the game as a given and makes predictions about the behavior of strategic players, the theory of mechanism design goes a step further and selects the optimal rules of the game. A relatively new economic theory, mechanism design studies the instrument itself as well as the results of the instrument. An Introduction to the Theory of Mechanism Design provides rigorous but accessible explanations of classic results in the theory of mechanism design, such as Myerson's theorem on expected revenue maximizing auctions, Myerson and Satterthwaite's theorem on the impossibility of ex post efficient bilateral trade with asymmetric information, and Gibbard and Satterthwaite's theorem on the non-existence of dominant strategy voting mechanisms. Borgers also provides an examination of the frontiers of current research in the area with an original and unified perspective that will appeal to advanced students of economics.

Mechanism design is an analytical framework for thinking clearly and carefully about what exactly a given institution can achieve when the information necessary to make decisions is dispersed and privately held. This analysis provides an account of the underlying mathematics of mechanism design based on linear programming. Three advantages characterize the approach. The first is simplicity: arguments based on linear programming are both elementary and transparent. The second is unity: the machinery of linear programming provides a way to unify results from disparate areas of mechanism design. The third is reach: the technique offers the ability to solve problems that appear to be beyond solutions offered by traditional methods. No claim is made that the approach advocated should supplant traditional mathematical machinery. Rather, the approach represents an addition to the tools of the economic theorist who proposes to understand economic phenomena through the lens of mechanism design.

A mechanism is a mathematical structure that models institutions through which economic activity is guided and coordinated. There are many such institutions; markets are the most familiar ones. Lawmakers, administrators and officers of private companies create institutions in order to achieve desired goals. They seek to do so in ways that economize on the resources needed to operate the institutions, and that provide incentives that induce the required behaviors. This book presents systematic procedures for designing mechanisms that achieve specified performance, and economize on the resources required to operate the mechanism. The systematic design procedures are algorithms for designing informationally efficient mechanisms. Most of the book deals with these procedures of design. When there are finitely many environments to be dealt with, and there is a Nash-implementing mechanism, our algorithms can be used to make that mechanism into an informationally efficient one. Informationally efficient dominant strategy implementation is also studied.

This book offers a self-sufficient treatment of a key tool, game theory and mechanism design, to model, analyze, and solve centralized as well as decentralized design problems involving multiple autonomous agents that interact strategically in a rational and intelligent way. The contents of the book provide a sound foundation of game theory and mechanism design theory which clearly represent the “science” behind traditional as well as emerging economic applications for the society.The importance of the discipline of game theory has been recognized through numerous Nobel prizes in economic sciences being awarded to game theorists, including the 2005, 2007, and 2012 prizes. The book distills the marvelous contributions of these and other celebrated game theorists and presents it in a way that can be easily understood even by senior undergraduate students.A unique feature of the book is its detailed coverage of mechanism design which is the art of designing a game among strategic agents so that a social goal is realized in an equilibrium of the induced game. Another feature is a large number of illustrative examples that are representative of both classical and modern applications of game theory and mechanism design. The book also includes informative biographical sketches of game theory legends, and is specially customized to a general engineering audience.After a thorough reading of this book, readers would be able to apply game theory and mechanism design in a principled and mature way to solve relevant problems in computer science (esp, artificial intelligence/machine learning), computer engineering, operations research, industrial engineering and microeconomics.