A central tenet in mechanism design is the ability to irrevocably commit to a mechanism. Commitment is achieved by public declaration, letting players verify incentive properties in advance and the outcome in retrospect. However, public declaration can reveal superfluous information that is private to the mechanism designer, such as her target function or costs. We propose a new approach to commitment, and show how to commit to, and run, any given mechanism without disclosing it, while enabling the verification of incentive properties and the outcome -- all without any mediators. Our framework leverages zero-knowledge proofs -- a cornerstone of modern cryptographic theory.

翻译：机制设计的一个核心原则是能够不可撤销地承诺一个机制。这种承诺通常通过公开声明实现，让参与者能够事先验证激励性质，并事后回溯结果。然而，公开声明可能泄露机制设计者私有的不必要信息，例如其目标函数或成本。我们提出一种新的承诺方法，展示如何在不披露机制的情况下承诺并运行任意给定的机制，同时实现激励性质和结果的可验证性——所有这些都无需任何中介。我们的框架利用了零知识证明——现代密码理论的基石。