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Deniz Kattwinkel

Publications and source records attributed to Deniz Kattwinkel.

12 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

The Division of Surplus and the Burden of Proof

A principal and an agent divide a surplus whose size is known only to the agent. The agent decides how much to reveal initially. Both parties can acquire costly evidence to verify the surplus. The agent's liability is bounded by the revealed surplus. The principal commits to their own acquisition-effort and to transfers contingent on who provides evidence. With these instruments, the principal simultaneously motivates the agent to reveal the surplus and to acquire evidence. We characterize optimal mechanisms using a novel technique that is based on reforming existing mechanisms and orders the instruments. It applies to related multi-instrument problems.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2026

Information for nothing and authority for free

A principal must decide whether to implement a project. She privately knows the cost, an agent privately knows the benefit. Monetary transfers are not available, and compared to the principal, the agent does not fully internalize the cost. We show that the principal-optimal mechanism does not require the agent to report. Instead, it either ignores the agent or endows the agent with free information and full decision authority.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2026

Robust Robustness

We propose a refinement of the maxmin approach to robustness. A mechanism's payoff guarantee over an ambiguity set is robust if the guarantee is approximately satisfied at priors near the ambiguity set (in the weak topology). We show that many maxmin-optimal mechanisms in the literature give payoff guarantees that are not robust. Such mechanisms are often tailored to degenerate worst-case priors, making them simple but fragile. Conversely, some commonly used ambiguity sets satisfy a structural property, termed richness, ensuring that every associated payoff guarantee is robust. We show how to slightly enlarge any ambiguity set to make it rich.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2026

Competitive Sequential Screening

We study competition between firms that contract with consumers before the consumers fully learn their product preferences. In a Hotelling duopoly, firms screen consumers by offering menus of option contracts. We characterize the unique equilibrium. Consumers select contracts from both firms. Each consumer is endogenously locked into the firm from which he chooses an option with a lower strike price. Lock-in yields inefficient consumption. Yet earlier contracting stiffens competition because less informed consumers are more homogeneous. Sufficiently early contracting raises consumer surplus relative to spot pricing -- reversing the ranking under monopoly. Exclusive contracting further increases consumer surplus by intensifying competition.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2026

Quota Mechanisms: Finite-Sample Optimality and Robustness

A quota mechanism, such as a mandatory grading curve, links together multiple decisions. We analyze the performance of quota mechanisms when the number of linked decisions is finite and the designer has imperfect knowledge of the type distribution. Using a new optimal transport approach, we derive an ex-post decision error guarantee for quota mechanisms. This guarantee cannot be improved by any mechanisms without transfers. We quantify the sensitivity of quota mechanisms to errors in the designer's estimate of the type distribution. Finally, we show that quotas are robust to a range of agents' beliefs about each other.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2026

Optimal Decision Mechanisms for Committees: Acquitting the Guilty

A group of privately informed agents chooses between two alternatives. How should the decision rule be designed if agents are known to be biased in favor of one of the options? We address this question by considering the Condorcet Jury Setting as a mechanism design problem. Applications include the optimal decision mechanisms for boards of directors, political committees, and trial juries. While we allow for any kind of mechanism, the optimal mechanism is a voting mechanism. In the terminology of the trial jury example: When jurors (agents) are more eager to convict than the lawmaker (principal), then the defendant should be convicted if and only if neither too many nor too few jurors vote to convict. This kind of mechanism accords with a judicial procedure from ancient Jewish law.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2025

Tight Samurai Accountant

This note applies tightness (Kattwinkel and Preusser (2025)) to the setting of Border and Sobel (1987, "Samurai Accountant: A Theory of Auditing and Plunder"). Border and Sobel characterize efficient mechanisms and argue that efficiency entails no loss of optimality. We characterize tight mechanisms and argue that tightness entails no loss of optimality. We show that tight mechanisms form a subset of efficient mechanisms. Therefore, tightness refines efficiency without loss of optimality. By characterizing tight mechanisms, one can replicate the insights from Border and Sobel (1987) and Chander and Wilde (1998). A novel insight is how and in which order the principal uses different instruments to provide incentives to different agent types. Further, we describe a procedure for constructing efficient mechanisms in a setting with a continuum of types.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2025

Who and How? Adverse Selection and flexible Moral Hazard

We characterize incentive compatible mechanisms in environments with hidden types and flexible hidden actions. Our approach introduces extended recommendation schedules that specify prescribed actions also off-path, after misreports. This approach yields a tractable and complete characterization of incentive compatibility, which includes a generalized integral monotonicity condition capturing the interaction between adverse selection and moral hazard. We demonstrate the usefulness of the characterization across a range of contracting problems.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2025

Probabilistic Verification in Mechanism Design

We introduce a model of probabilistic verification in mechanism design. The principal elicits a message from the agent and then selects a test to give the agent. The agent's true type determines the probability with which he can pass each test. We characterize whether each type has an associated test that best screens out all other types. If this condition holds, then the testing technology can be represented in a tractable reduced form. We use this reduced form to solve for profit-maximizing mechanisms with verification. As the verification technology varies, the solution continuously interpolates between the no-verification solution and full surplus extraction.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2022

Mechanisms without transfers for fully biased agents

A principal must decide between two options. Which one she prefers depends on the private information of two agents. One agent always prefers the first option; the other always prefers the second. Transfers are infeasible. One application of this setting is the efficient division of a fixed budget between two competing departments. We first characterize all implementable mechanisms under arbitrary correlation. Second, we study when there exists a mechanism that yields the principal a higher payoff than she could receive by choosing the ex-ante optimal decision without consulting the agents. In the budget example, such a profitable mechanism exists if and only if the information of one department is also relevant for the expected returns of the other department. We generalize this insight to derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a profitable mechanism in the n-agent allocation problem with independent types.

econ.TH↗
arXiv2022

Comment on Jackson and Sonnenschein (2007) "Overcoming Incentive Constraints by Linking Decisions"

We correct a bound in the definition of approximate truthfulness used in the body of the paper of Jackson and Sonnenschein (2007). The proof of their main theorem uses a different permutation-based definition, implicitly claiming that the permutation-version implies the bound-based version. We show that this claim holds only if the bound is loosened. The new bound is still strong enough to guarantee that the fraction of lies vanishes as the number of problems grows, so the theorem is correct as stated once the bound is loosened.

econ.TH↗