Mechanism Design
Designing a rule so that telling the truth is the smart move
About 50 minutesAdvancedSociety and AI
What your child can do at the end
Define incentive compatibility and give one rule that has it and one that does not
The brief
Ordinary design asks what people should do. Mechanism design asks what rule to write so that self-interested people do it anyway. The second-price auction is the clean example: change who pays what, and honesty stops being a sacrifice. In this lab you measure that claim over thousands of simulated auctions, then measure the first-price auction and watch honesty become expensive again.
Skills it develops
abstractionprobabilityalgorithmic thinking
How it is assessed
3 graded challenges inside the lab, and 8 questions at the end that check the idea rather than the clicks. Every attempt is saved, so a retry after a mistake counts as the learning it is.