Using Mechanism Design to Prevent False-Name Manipulations

The basic notion of false-name-proofness allows for useful mechanisms under certain circumstances, but in general there are impossibility results that show that false-name-proof mechanisms have severe limitations. One may react to these impossibility results by saying that, since false-name-proof mechanisms are unsatisfactory, we should not run any important mechanisms in highly anonymous settings--unless, perhaps, we can find some methodology that directly prevents false-name manipulation even in such settings, so that we are back in a more typical mechanism design context. Because the Internet is so attractive as a platform for running certain types of mechanisms, it seems unlikely that the organizations running these mechanisms will take them offline. As a result, perhaps the most promising approaches at this point are those that combine techniques from mechanism design with other techniques discussed in this article.