We study small-scale market interactions in which buyers are allowed to credibly reveal partial information about their types to the seller. Previous recent work has studied the special case where there is one buyer and one good, showing that such communication can simultaneously improve social welfare and ex ante buyer utility. With multiple buyers, we find that the buyer-optimal signalling schemes from the one-buyer case are actually harmful to buyer welfare. Moreover, we prove several impossibility results showing that, with either multiple i.i.d. buyers or multiple i.i.d. goods, maximizing buyer utility can be at odds with social efficiency, which is a surprising contrast to the one-buyer, one-good case. Finally, we investigate the computational tractability of implementing desirable equilibrium outcomes. We find that, even with one buyer and one good, optimizing buyer utility is generally NP-hard, but tractable in a practical restricted setting.
翻译:我们研究了小规模市场互动,允许买方向卖方可靠地披露有关其类型的部分信息。前几次工作研究了一个买方和一个货物的特殊情况,表明这种通信可以同时改善社会福利和前买方效用。与多个买方,我们发现一买方案件中最佳买方信号计划实际上有害于买方福利。此外,我们证明若干不可能的结果表明,如果是多个一买方或多个一货物,最大程度的买方效用可能与社会效率不符,这与一个买方,一个好案例形成惊人的对比。最后,我们调查了实施理想平衡结果的计算可及性。我们发现,即使有一个买方和一个良好买方,优化买方效用通常很难做到NP,但在实际的限制性环境下是可以做到的。