Executive Summary : | The goal of this proposal is a holistic and systematic look at the subject of shaping information to be sent to players from a principal, a topic that we call information design. The setting we explore is one where users or players are privy to some private and some public information. They report this information to a central authority which, using these inputs, computes a signal to send back to the players. Depending on the case at hand, this signal may be constrained, for instance, to be truthful, consistent, or uniform across players, or constrained by limitations of communication. The payoff of the player may change explicitly with this feedback (due to incentives, say) or implicitly (due to change in information). Within this setting, we plan to design protocols of information exchange from the players to the central authority and from the central authority back to the players in order to achieve system level objectives.
We envision this (at least from our perspective) innovative and original proposal as 1) providing a fundamental alternative to pricing based mechanisms thereby making it viable even in the absence of monetary transfers and 2) exploring new vistas for research at the intersection of game theory, information theory and control theory. In the Smart Grid and Smart Cities context, applications involve a real-time change in behaviour. The lack of liquidity, extreme specificity and the fleeting nature of such situations makes monetary mechanisms infeasible. The information design alternatives will provide soft nudges through signals to influence behaviour. In the process we anticipate contributions to new and foundational questions at the intersection of information theory, game theory and control theory. |