Ex-Post Individual Rationality Predicate

A direct mechanism is ex-post individually rational when truthful reporting gives each agent nonnegative utility for every true type profile and every profile of the other agents' reports.

The predicate is ex-post because it is stated pointwise over realized types and reports rather than in expectation over a prior.

References

• [AGT, Chapter 9, Lem. 9.20] Nisan, Roughgarden, Tardos, and Vazirani, Algorithmic Game Theory. Individual rationality for Clarke-pivot VCG mechanisms with nonnegative valuations.
• [AGT, Chapter 9, Section 9.5.5] Nisan, Roughgarden, Tardos, and Vazirani, Algorithmic Game Theory. Individual-rationality constraints in mechanism-design applications.

Provenance

• Migrated from EconCSLib pull request 27, old blueprint label def:md_basic_interface in blueprint/src/content.tex.