Mechanism Design

"In this public project case, or in the auction case. We don't know people's values, so what we'd like to do is we'd like to create a mechanism where people truthfully reveal their values, and where we get outcomes that are desired

"we can write down models of auctions and we can develop some really profound results saying that it doesn't matter how you auction things off provided some conditions are met. So that's really nice. It sort of frees us up to think

"When you think about designing mechanisms in effect what we are doing, we are designing incentive structures so that we get the sort of outcomes we want. Now to get those outcomes often what we're trying to do is we're trying to

"Mechanism design the standard way, and the standard way is to assume that people are rational. So we're gonna sort of lay out the basics of mechanism design assuming rational agents. But after we do that we'll talk through what if people