Empirical mechanism design: Methods, with application to a supply-chain scenario

Our proposed methods employ learning and search techniques to estimate outcome features of interest as a function of mechanism parameter settings. We illustrate our approach with a design task from a supply-chain trading competition. Designers adopted several rule changes in order to deter particular procurement behavior, but the measures proved insufficient. Our empirical mechanism analysis models the relation between a key design parameter and outcomes, confirming the observed behavior and indicating that no reasonable parameter settings would have been likely to achieve the desired effect. More generally, we show that under certain conditions, the estimator of optimal mechanism parameter setting based on empirical data is consistent.