Bayesian Promised Persuasion: Dynamic Forward-Looking Multiagent Delegation with Informational Burning
This work addresses incentive alignment in multiagent systems for applications like resource allocation, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing mechanism design concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of dynamic mechanism design for multiagent delegation without monetary transfers, using informational burning to ensure incentive compatibility. It proposes a Bayesian promised delegation mechanism that achieves optimal social welfare in stationary Markov perfect Bayesian equilibria.
This work studies a dynamic mechanism design problem in which a principal delegates decision makings to a group of privately-informed agents without the monetary transfer or burning. We consider that the principal privately possesses complete knowledge about the state transitions and study how she can use her private observation to support the incentive compatibility of the delegation via informational burning, a process we refer to as the looking-forward persuasion. The delegation mechanism is formulated in which the agents form belief hierarchies due to the persuasion and play a dynamic Bayesian game. We propose a novel randomized mechanism, known as Bayesian promised delegation (BPD), in which the periodic incentive compatibility is guaranteed by persuasions and promises of future delegations. We show that the BPD can achieve the same optimal social welfare as the original mechanism in stationary Markov perfect Bayesian equilibria. A revelation-principle-like design regime is established to show that the persuasion with belief hierarchies can be fully characterized by correlating the randomization of the agents' local BPD mechanisms with the persuasion as a direct recommendation of the future promises.