Choosing the winner of a competition using natural mechanisms: Conditions based on the jury

摘要

A possibly partial jury has to choose the winner of a competition. A deserving winner exists and her identity is common knowledge among the jurors, but it is not known by the planner. Jurors may be biased in favor (friend) or against (enemy) some contestants. We study the conditions based on the configuration of the jury such that it is possible to implement the deserving winner in Nash equilibrium when we restrict ourselves to mechanisms that satisfy two conditions: (1) each juror only has to announce the contestant she thinks should win the competition, and (2) announcing the deserving winner is always an equilibrium. We refer to this notion as natural implementation. We show that knowledge of jurors' friends or jurors' enemies may help to naturally implement the deserving winner. In particular, our results suggest that knowledge of jurors' friends may be more useful to the planner than knowledge of jurors' enemies in terms of facilitating natural implementation. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.