In this episode, Vitali Gretschko sheds some light on a fundamental game theoretic concept: Commitment. He explains why commitment is a crucial prerequisite of auctions and introduces different ways of generating commitment.

We also explore how commitment is linked to the concept of information and discuss auction concepts which make it less likely for the auctioneer to break their commitment afterwards.

Vitali Gretschko is Professor of Market Design at the University of Mannheim and head of the ZEW Research Department "Market Design".

In the interview, Vitali mentions papers explaining how to use cryptography to create commitment in mechanism designs. You can find them here and here.