economic theory Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyzes ...

, the Wilson doctrine (or Wilson critique) stipulates that

game theory Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions among rational agents. Myerson, Roger B. (1991). ''Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict,'' Harvard University Press, p.&nbs1 Chapter-preview links, ppvii–xi It has appli ...

should not rely excessively on common knowledge assumptions. Most prominently, it is interpreted as a request for institutional designs to be "detail-free". That is, mechanism designers should offer solutions that do not depend on market details (such as distributions or functional forms of payoff relevant signals) because they may be unknown to practitioners or are subject to intractable change. The name is due to Nobel laureate Robert Wilson, who argued:

Game theory has a great advantage in explicitly analyzing the consequences of trading rules that presumably are really common knowledge; it is deficient to the extent it assumes other features to be common knowledge, such as one agent's probability assessment about another’s preferences or information. I foresee the progress of game theory as depending on successive reductions in the base of common knowledge required to conduct useful analyses of practical problems. Only by repeated weakening of common knowledge assumptions will the theory approximate reality.

While the above quote is often seen as the Wilson doctrine, mechanism design researchers derive an insistence on detail-free mechanisms from it. For instance,

Partha Dasgupta Sir Partha Sarathi Dasgupta (born on 17 November 1942), is an Indian-British economist who is the Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom and Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. Personal ...

and

Eric Maskin Eric Stark Maskin (born December 12, 1950) is an American economist and mathematician. He was jointly awarded the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson "for having laid the foundations of mechanism d ...

, as well as

Mark Satterthwaite Mark Allen Satterthwaite is an economist at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He is currently A.C. Buehler Professor in Hospital & Health Services Management, Professor of Strategic Management & Ma ...

and Steven Williams, attribute this insistence to Wilson. This interpretation might also go back to another paper by Wilson in which he praises the double auction because it "does not rely on features of the agents' common knowledge, such as their probability assessment". While Wilson himself agrees with the spirit of demanding detail-free mechanisms, he is surprised to be credited for it. In line with the above quote, Dirk Bergemann and Stephen Morris see the doctrine as a reminder of

John Harsanyi John Charles Harsanyi ( hu, Harsányi János Károly; May 29, 1920 – August 9, 2000) was a Hungarian-American economist and the recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994. He is best known for his contributions to the ...

's insight that common knowledge assumptions can be made explicit (and then relaxed) by enriching the type space with beliefs. This interpretation gave rise to their notion of robust mechanism design. An alternative approach to robust mechanism design assumes non-probabilistic uncertainty. For instance,

Gabriel Carroll Gabriel Drew Carroll (born December 24, 1982) is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto. He was born to tech industry worker parents in Oakland. He graduated from Harvard University with B.A. in mathematics and linguist ...

has a series of papers in which the principal evaluates outcomes on a worst-case basis.

References

Mechanism design {{Gametheory-stub