Assoc. Prof. Dawen Meng 

School of Economics, Shanghai University of Finance and Economic, China

Research Area: Economics, Contract Theory, Industrial Organization Theory, Game Theory

Brief introduction of research experience:

Dr. Meng is an associate professor at the School of Economics of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. His research focuses on contract and mechanism design theory with its applications on industrial organization. He obtained a Ph.D. in economics in 2009 from SHUFE. During the period from 2005 to 2010, he hold positions of lecturer at Shanghai University of International Business and Economics and East China Normal University. He joined the faculty of my Alma Mater in 2011. He has his works published on academic journals such as Games and Economic Behavior, Economic Theory, Review of Economic Design, Operations Research Letters, and several Chinese journals.

Speech Title: Dynamic Mechanism Design on Social Networks

Abstract:

This paper studies a mechanism design problem with networked agents and stochastically evolving private information.In contrast to the canonical mechanism design theory focusing mainly on the information issues, we pay more attention to impacts of the topology of social network. We find the standard first-order approach for mechanism design is not applicable in our dynamic environment. As a remedy, a novel ironing technique is proposed, which produces a perfectly sorting allocation. Based on the optimal dynamic mechanism obtained, we define and compare some important nodes and links in a network (including key customer, top influencer, key link and stable link) for different ranges of synergy parameter. We further discuss the network intervention problem where a central planner allocate optimally a finite budget among multiple tasks of changing the means and variances of agents' initial types. Also, we discuss the applications of our result in economic problems such as the choice of airline, the identification and quarantine of key infestor in epidemic prevention and control .