Opening the Strategic Pandora Box: Conditional Transaction Mechanisms

RESUMO

Conditional transaction engines (CTEs) execute conditional instructions for offline users. This paper formalizes the mechanism-design problem within each engine invocation. A conditional transaction mechanism (CTM) decides which pending conditions to evaluate first because each evaluation delays the eventual write. We model this problem as Strategic Pandora, a discounted variant of the Pandora's box model with independent Bernoulli boxes. Agents report privately assessed success probabilities and, in the full model, values for the write action. We propose the reported-Weitzman mechanism (RW) and the reported-values second-price mechanism (RWSP). To compare revenue without a common prior, we introduce dynamic No-Betting Revenue. Under the stated competition and equilibrium conditions, every qualifying pure equilibrium of RW or RWSP earns a constant fraction of its corresponding dynamic NBR benchmark.