Information Disclosure Makes Simple Mechanisms Competitive

Abstract: In classical mechanism design, the prevailing assumption is that the information structure about agents' types is exogenous. This assumption introduces complexity, especially with multi-dimensional agent types, leading to mechanisms that, while optimal, may appear complex and unnatural. Furthermore, Hart and Nisan (2019) show that the gap between the performance of any simple mechanism and the optimal solution could be potentially unbounded. We challenge this conventional view by showing that simple mechanisms can be highly competitive if the information structure is endogenous and can be influenced by the designer. We study a multi-dimensional generalization of a single-dimensional model proposed by Bergemann and Pesendorfer (2007), where the designer can shape the information structure via information disclosure. Specifically, we consider a fundamental multi-dimensional mechanism design problem, where a seller is selling m items to a single unit-demand buyer to maximize her revenue. The buyer's values can be arbitrarily correlated across the items. Our main result shows that, following an appropriately chosen information disclosure scheme, item pricing, i.e., set a take-it-or-leave-it price on each item is highly competitive and guarantees to attain at least 50.1% of the optimal revenue. To our knowledge, this is the first result demonstrating the (approximate) optimality of simple mechanisms in this extensively studied multi-dimensional setting, without making any assumptions about the buyer's value distribution. We believe our result not only demonstrates the power of information disclosure in enhancing the performance of simple mechanisms but also suggests a new framework for reevaluating their efficacy in multi-dimensional settings.