On mechanisms eliciting ordinal preferences

When is a mechanism designer justified in only asking for ordinal information about preferences? Simple examples show that even if the planner's goal (expressed by a social choice correspondence (SCC)) depends only on ordinal information, eliciting cardinal information may help with incentives. However, if agents may be uncertain about their own cardinal preferences, then a strong robustness requirement can justify the focus on ordinal mechanisms. Specifically, when agents' preferences over pure outcomes are strict, if a planner is able to implement an SCC (in ex post equilibrium) using a mechanism that is robust to interdependence of arbitrary form in cardinal preferences, then there must exist such a mechanism that elicits only ordinal preferences. The strictness assumption can be dropped if we further allow the possibility of non‐expected‐utility preferences.