Mathematical Conversations

Higher-order beliefs are of great importance in reasoning about agents’ strategic behavior, and have been long studied in epistemic game theory. Yet it was unclear whether eliciting such beliefs from the agents can help a social planner to better achieve his goal, and if so then how. Using single-good auctions as an example, I’ll show that doing so indeed helps, and the information that can be elicited tightly rely on the agents’ higher-order rationality: the more rational they are, the more information the social planner can elicit.