Strategic deliberation and truthful revelation: an impossibility result

In many market settings, agents do not know their preferences apriori. Instead, they may have to solve computationally complex optimization problems, query databases, or perform expensive searchesin order to determine their values for different outcomes. For such settings, we have introduced the deliberation equilibrium as the game-theoretic solution concept where the agents' deliberation actions are modeled aspart of their strategies.In this paper we lay out auction design principles for deliberative agents. We propose a set of intuitive properties which are desirable in auctions for deliberative agents. First, we propose that auctions should be non-deliberative: the auction should notactively do the deliberation for the agents. Second, auctions should be deliberation-proof: in equilibrium agents should not have anincentive to deliberate on each others' valuation problems. Third, the auction should be non-deceiving: agents should not have incentive to strategically misrepresent. We show that it is impossible to design interesting auctions which have these three properties.