Keeping the Agents in the Dark: Competing Mechanisms, Private Disclosures, and the Revelation Principle

Abstract

We study the design of market information in competing-mechanism games. We identify a new dimension, private disclosures, whereby the principals asymmetrically inform the agents of how their mechanisms operate. We show that private disclosures have two important effects. First, they can raise a principal's payoff guarantee against her competitors' threats. Second, they can support equilibrium outcomes and payoffs that cannot be supported with standard mechanisms. These results call for a novel approach to competing mechanisms, which we develop to identify a canonical game and a canonical class of equilibria, thereby establishing a new revelation principle for this class of environments.

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Reference

Andrea Attar, Eloisa Campioni, Thomas Mariotti, and Alessandro Pavan, “Keeping the Agents in the Dark: Competing Mechanisms, Private Disclosures, and the Revelation Principle”, TSE Working Paper, n. 21-1227, June 2021, revised June 2025.