Thanks Luis. Read (listened to) this in part, intend/hope to read it more carefully as well as the paper itself.
Some quick takes
I mostly agree with all your points about feasibility. Why do you think the QF and CQF got so much attention?
There is a lot of focus in this literature and in your writing on ‘whether the mechanism can be proved to be optimal’. This may be the theoretical ‘object under the streetlamp’ (we have tools for this proof) but to me it’s more important to consider ‘when is a QF or a CQF an improvement over no coordination?’
2a. Empirical trials in relevant setting could potentially be informative about the latter, if the theoretical results are intractable or ambiguous.
I’m not fully convinced that the assumptions you discuss (Freitas and Maldonado, 2022) are more realistic. It’s just a different extreme assumption, no, not a generalization?
I don’t know, your guess is probably as good as mine here
I broadly agree with you about this point. The whole exercise of public good provision is trying to improve over the welfare level of private provision, but it’s not as if falling short from full efficiency makes a mechanism undesirable. Higher efficiency is one of the things we should aim for relative to existing solutions; perhaps the most important one, but not necessarily the dominant consideration, and improvements to various degrees seem valuable. I emphasize “full” efficiency in this writeup because it’s a major ground that’s given to justify the perspective that QF is promising.
Not quite sure I understand your point about it being a different extreme assumption. It is a generalization because the complete information case can be seen as a particular case of the setting we use. For example:
When every individual only has a single type
When only a single type occurs with positive probability
When types are perfectly correlated with each other
Thanks Luis. Read (listened to) this in part, intend/hope to read it more carefully as well as the paper itself.
Some quick takes
I mostly agree with all your points about feasibility. Why do you think the QF and CQF got so much attention?
There is a lot of focus in this literature and in your writing on ‘whether the mechanism can be proved to be optimal’. This may be the theoretical ‘object under the streetlamp’ (we have tools for this proof) but to me it’s more important to consider ‘when is a QF or a CQF an improvement over no coordination?’
2a. Empirical trials in relevant setting could potentially be informative about the latter, if the theoretical results are intractable or ambiguous.
I’m not fully convinced that the assumptions you discuss (Freitas and Maldonado, 2022) are more realistic. It’s just a different extreme assumption, no, not a generalization?
Thanks, David! My first reaction your points:
I don’t know, your guess is probably as good as mine here
I broadly agree with you about this point. The whole exercise of public good provision is trying to improve over the welfare level of private provision, but it’s not as if falling short from full efficiency makes a mechanism undesirable. Higher efficiency is one of the things we should aim for relative to existing solutions; perhaps the most important one, but not necessarily the dominant consideration, and improvements to various degrees seem valuable. I emphasize “full” efficiency in this writeup because it’s a major ground that’s given to justify the perspective that QF is promising.
Not quite sure I understand your point about it being a different extreme assumption. It is a generalization because the complete information case can be seen as a particular case of the setting we use. For example:
When every individual only has a single type
When only a single type occurs with positive probability
When types are perfectly correlated with each other