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Undominated monopoly regulation

Debasis Mishra and Sanket Patil
2025
Working Paper No
718
Body

We study undominated mechanisms with transfers for regulating a monopolist who privately observes the marginal cost of production. A mechanism is undominated if no other mechanism gives the regulator a strictly higher payoff at some marginal cost of the monopolist without lowering the regulator’s payoff at other costs. We show that an undominated mechanism has a quantity floor: whenever the monopolist is allowed to operate, it produces above a threshold quantity. Moreover, the regulator’s operation decision is stochastic only if the monopolist produces at the quantity floor. We provide a near-complete characterization of the set of undominated mechanisms and use it to (a) derive a max-min optimal regulatory mechanism, (b) provide a foundation for deterministic mechanisms, and (c) show that the efficient mechanism is dominated.

Key words
regulation, undominated mechanisms, floor-randomized mechanisms, downward distortion.
WP No. 718.pdf (1.07 MB)

Undominated monopoly regulation

Author(s) Name: Debasis Mishra and Sanket Patil, 2025
Working Paper No : 718
Abstract:

We study undominated mechanisms with transfers for regulating a monopolist who privately observes the marginal cost of production. A mechanism is undominated if no other mechanism gives the regulator a strictly higher payoff at some marginal cost of the monopolist without lowering the regulator’s payoff at other costs. We show that an undominated mechanism has a quantity floor: whenever the monopolist is allowed to operate, it produces above a threshold quantity. Moreover, the regulator’s operation decision is stochastic only if the monopolist produces at the quantity floor. We provide a near-complete characterization of the set of undominated mechanisms and use it to (a) derive a max-min optimal regulatory mechanism, (b) provide a foundation for deterministic mechanisms, and (c) show that the efficient mechanism is dominated.

Keywords: regulation, undominated mechanisms, floor-randomized mechanisms, downward distortion.
WP No. 718.pdf (1.07 MB)