IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/kyo/wpaper/1027.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Mechanism Design with Blockchain Enforcement

Author

Listed:
  • Hitoshi Matsushima

    (Department of Economics, University of Tokyo)

  • Shunya Noda

    (Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia)

Abstract

We study the design of self-enforcing mechanisms that rely on neither a trusted third party (e.g., court, trusted mechanism designer) nor a long-term relationship. Instead, we use a smart contract written on blockchains as a commitment device. We design the digital court, a smart contract that identifies and punishes agents who reneged on the agreement. The digital court substitutes the role of legal enforcement in the traditional mechanism design paradigm. We show that, any agreement that is implementable with legal enforcement can also be implemented with enforcement by the digital court. To pursue a desirable design of the digital court, we study a way to leverage truthful reports made by a small fraction of behavioral agents. Our digital court has a unique equilibrium as long as there is a positive fraction of behavioral agents, and it gives correct judgment in the equilibrium if honest agents are more likely to exist than dishonest agents. The platform for smart contracts is already ready in 2020; thus, self-enforcing mechanisms proposed in this paper can be used practically, even now. As our digital court can be used for implementing general agreements, it does not leak the detailed information about the agreement even if it is deployed on a public blockchain (e.g., Ethereum) as a smart contract.

Suggested Citation

  • Hitoshi Matsushima & Shunya Noda, 2020. "Mechanism Design with Blockchain Enforcement," KIER Working Papers 1027, Kyoto University, Institute of Economic Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:kyo:wpaper:1027
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.kier.kyoto-u.ac.jp/DP/DP1027.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Morris, Stephen & Shin, Hyun Song, 1998. "Unique Equilibrium in a Model of Self-Fulfilling Currency Attacks," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 88(3), pages 587-597, June.
    2. Moore, John & Repullo, Rafael, 1988. "Subgame Perfect Implementation," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 56(5), pages 1191-1220, September.
    3. Eric Budish, 2018. "The Economic Limits of Bitcoin and the Blockchain," NBER Working Papers 24717, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Lin William Cong & Zhiguo He, 2019. "Blockchain Disruption and Smart Contracts," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 32(5), pages 1754-1797.
    5. Carlsson, Hans & van Damme, Eric, 1993. "Global Games and Equilibrium Selection," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 61(5), pages 989-1018, September.
    6. Palfrey, Thomas R & Srivastava, Sanjay, 1991. "Nash Implementation Using Undominated Strategies," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 59(2), pages 479-501, March.
    7. Uri Gneezy, 2005. "Deception: The Role of Consequences," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(1), pages 384-394, March.
    8. Matsushima, Hitoshi, 1988. "A new approach to the implementation problem," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 45(1), pages 128-144, June.
    9. Matthew O. Jackson, 1992. "Implementation in Undominated Strategies: A Look at Bounded Mechanisms," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 59(4), pages 757-775.
    10. Postlewaite, Andrew & Vives, Xavier, 1987. "Bank Runs as an Equilibrium Phenomenon," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 95(3), pages 485-491, June.
    11. Susan Athey & Ilya Segal, 2013. "An Efficient Dynamic Mechanism," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 81(6), pages 2463-2485, November.
    12. Eric Maskin, 1999. "Nash Equilibrium and Welfare Optimality," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 66(1), pages 23-38.
    13. Huberman, Gur & Leshno, Jacob & Moallemi, Ciamac C., 2017. "Monopoly Without a Monopolist: An Economic Analysis of the Bitcoin Payment System," CEPR Discussion Papers 12322, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    14. McAfee, R Preston & McMillan, John, 1987. "Auctions and Bidding," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 25(2), pages 699-738, June.
    15. repec:zbw:bofrdp:2017_027 is not listed on IDEAS
    16. Abreu, Dilip & Matsushima, Hitoshi, 1992. "A Response [Virtual Implementation in Iteratively Undominated Strategies I: Complete Information]," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 60(6), pages 1439-1442, November.
    17. Abreu, Dilip & Sen, Arunava, 1991. "Virtual Implementation in Nash Equilibrium," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 59(4), pages 997-1021, July.
    18. Abreu, Dilip & Matsushima, Hitoshi, 1992. "Virtual Implementation in Iteratively Undominated Strategies: Complete Information," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 60(5), pages 993-1008, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hitoshi Matsushima & Shunya Noda, 2020. "Epistemological Mechanism Design (Revised version of CARF-F-496)," CARF F-Series CARF-F-498, Center for Advanced Research in Finance, Faculty of Economics, The University of Tokyo, revised Feb 2021.
    2. Matsushima, Hitoshi, 2022. "Epistemological implementation of social choice functions," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 136(C), pages 389-402.
    3. Kunimoto, Takashi & Zhang, Cuiling, 2022. "Efficient bilateral trade via two-stage mechanisms: Comparison between one-sided and two-sided asymmetric information environments," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 101(C).
    4. Hitoshi Matsushima & Shunya Noda, 2020. "Unique Information Elicitation," CARF F-Series CARF-F-496, Center for Advanced Research in Finance, Faculty of Economics, The University of Tokyo.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kartik, Navin & Tercieux, Olivier & Holden, Richard, 2014. "Simple mechanisms and preferences for honesty," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 83(C), pages 284-290.
    2. Roberto Serrano, 2003. "The Theory of Implementation of Social Choice Rules," Working Papers 2003-19, Brown University, Department of Economics.
    3. Maskin, Eric & Sjostrom, Tomas, 2002. "Implementation theory," Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare,in: K. J. Arrow & A. K. Sen & K. Suzumura (ed.), Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 5, pages 237-288 Elsevier.
    4. Caffera, Marcelo & Dubra, Juan & Figueroa, Nicolás, 2018. "Mechanism design when players’ preferences and information coincide," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 91(C), pages 56-61.
    5. Matthew O. Jackson, 2001. "A crash course in implementation theory," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 18(4), pages 655-708.
    6. Hayashi, Takashi & Lombardi, Michele, 2019. "One-step-ahead implementation," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 83(C), pages 110-126.
    7. Hitoshi Matsushima, 2021. "Partial ex-post verifiability and unique implementation of social choice functions," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 56(3), pages 549-567, April.
    8. Korpela, Ville & Lombardi, Michele & Vartiainen, Hannu, 2020. "Do coalitions matter in designing institutions?," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 185(C).
    9. Lombardi, Michele & Yoshihara, Naoki, 2016. "Partially-honest Nash Implementation with Non-connected Honesty Standards," Discussion Paper Series 633, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University.
    10. Mezzetti, Claudio & Renou, Ludovic, 2012. "Implementation in mixed Nash equilibrium," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 147(6), pages 2357-2375.
    11. Michele Lombardi & Naoki Yoshihara, 2017. "Treading a Â…fine line: (Im)possibilities for Nash implementation with partially-honest individuals," Working Papers SDES-2017-14, Kochi University of Technology, School of Economics and Management, revised Aug 2017.
    12. Lombardi, M. & Yoshihara, N., 2018. "Treading a fine line: (Im)possibilities for Nash implementation with partially-honest individuals," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 111(C), pages 203-216.
    13. Serrano, Roberto & Vohra, Rajiv, 2010. "Multiplicity of mixed equilibria in mechanisms: A unified approach to exact and approximate implementation," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 46(5), pages 775-785, September.
    14. Philippe Aghion & Drew Fudenberg & Richard Holden & Takashi Kunimoto & Olivier Tercieux, 2012. "Subgame-Perfect Implementation Under Information Perturbations," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 127(4), pages 1843-1881.
    15. Hitoshi Matsushima, 2019. "Partial Ex-Post Verifiability and Unique Implementation of Social Choice Functions (Forthcoming in Social Choice and Welfare)," CARF F-Series CARF-F-453, Center for Advanced Research in Finance, Faculty of Economics, The University of Tokyo.
    16. Matsushima, Hitoshi, 2022. "Epistemological implementation of social choice functions," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 136(C), pages 389-402.
    17. Michele Lombardi & Naoki Yoshihara, 2020. "Partially-honest Nash implementation: a full characterization," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 70(3), pages 871-904, October.
    18. Hitoshi Matsushima, 2015. "Implementation, Verification, and Detection," CIRJE F-Series CIRJE-F-991, CIRJE, Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo.
    19. Jackson Matthew O. & Palfrey Thomas R. & Srivastava Sanjay, 1994. "Undominated Nash Implementation in Bounded Mechanisms," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 6(3), pages 474-501, May.
    20. Ortner, Juan, 2015. "Direct implementation with minimally honest individuals," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 90(C), pages 1-16.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Implementation; Decentralized Mechanism; Smart Contract; Oracle Problem; Self-Judgment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D47 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Market Design
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • L86 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Information and Internet Services; Computer Software

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kyo:wpaper:1027. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Makoto Watanabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iekyojp.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.