Credible Auctions: A Trilemma with Mohammad Akbarpour | a16z crypto research talks

A discussion of the so-called auction trilemma in a blockchain environment. An auction can have any two of the three following properties: static, strategy proof, or credible. Which two the designer chooses also characterizes the kind of auction (first price, second price, and ascending). Here, Mohammad Akbarpour (Stanford Graduate School of Business) focuses on the incentive compatibility for the auctioneer – ensuring that auctioneers do not find it profitable to cheat (where cheating is defined as behavior that can be made to look “legal” to each participant by misrepresenting the preferences of the other participants). Mohammad examines the optimal auctions in which only winners pay, under symmetric independent private values. The first-price auction is the unique credible static mechanism. The ascending auction is the unique credible strategy-proof mechanism.

About the speaker
Mohammad is an associate professor of economics at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and an associate professor of computer science (by courtesy) at Stanford University. In 2020, he was elected as a Sloan research fellow. Mohammad’s research focuses on market design and social networks. Recently, he has worked on problems related to inequality in market design and network targeting with applications in development economics. He is also an instructor at Khan Academy Farsi, teaching hundreds of high-school level video lessons in game theory, physics, calculus, and macroeconomics. He received his Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology and his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.

About a16z crypto research
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