Studies in Mechanism Design and Game Theory.

Mechanism design or implementation theory, which studies the design of institutions or mechanisms implementing collective decisions under different circumstances, has been a major research area in the last three decades. hannu Vartiainen's doctoral dissertation analyzes several issues in this theory. The first essay considers implementation in the framework of two-player bargaining games which set-up has not been much studied in the literature. The second essay provides a full characterization of sub-game perfect implementation. In the first two essays complete information is assumed, while the third essay adopts a Bayesian framework. The third essay looks at auction design when neither the seller nor the buyers can commit to the initial rules of the auction.