the engineering of economic mechanisms to achieve desired outcomes given strategic behavior by rational agents
mechanism design is the inverse of game theory: rather than analyzing existing games, it constructs rules, incentives, and information structures that lead participants toward a target equilibrium
in cyber, mechanism design governs learning incentives, costly signaling, and ICBS market structure, aligning individual optimization with collective intelligence growth
key concepts include incentive compatibility, revelation principle, and auction theory, formalized by Hurwicz, Maskin, and Myerson