Prof. Sophie Bade

Obvious Strategy Proofness and Ambiguity Aversion

Sophie Bade’s research interests lie in two main areas: ambiguity aversion and mechanism design. During her visit to CES, she will explore obviously strategy proof mechanisms on discrete choice domains. A mechanism is obviously strategy proof if it is – in a well-defined sense – very easy for agents to see that misrepresentation never pays off. Over the years it has become clear that obvious strategy proofness is hard to achieve on generic domains but easy to achieve on single peaked domains. Ms. Bade plans to show that even the notoriously tricky roommate problems allow for obviously strategy-proof mechanisms when assuming that the agents’ preferences are single peaked.

While in Munich, Ms. Bade hopes to use the proximity to Matthias Lang of the Planck Institut in Bonn to explore connections between obvious strategy proofness and ambiguity aversion. On the one hand, both these approaches model agents as pessimists who focus on the worst of all possible outcomes. But, possibly surprisingly, the set of implementable social choice functions decreases sharply when imposing obvious strategy proofness but increases vastly under the assumption of ambiguity aversion. This project is at a very exploratory stage, and Ms. Bade looks forward to free roaming discussions in the Spring atmosphere in Munich.

Sophie Bade is a Professor at Royal Holloway College, University of London. She received her PhD from NYU and was then an Assistant Professor at the Pennsylvania State University in State College, and later a post doc at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn. Her work has been published in Theoretical Economics, the Journal of Economic Theory and Games and Economic Behavior.