Essays on Information Exchange

Abstract

In today's highly interconnected world, information has evolved into a pervasive and essential commodity. As a result, understanding its impact on institutional outcomes, market dynamics, and decision-making processes is of utmost importance. This dissertation explores three interconnected questions concerning mechanism and information design, aiming to illuminate the intricacies of information flow in modern society. The findings gleaned from this research hold substantial implications for a range of disciplines, such as auction design, political economy, and industrial organization. The initial chapter delves into mechanism design with belief-dependent preferences, introducing a novel revelation principle tailored for such contexts. By employing extended direct mechanisms and incorporating a credibility condition, this principle captures how information is revealed in any mechanism. The second chapter investigates information markets and revenue-maximizing strategies in a quadratic game, highlighting that the optimal selling scheme may, in fact, obscure information. The third and last chapter evaluates class of mechanisms called neutral mechanisms, which aim to facilitate information sharing between informed and uninformed parties. It discusses the conditions under which these mechanisms can be effective or ineffective for information sharing.