STIET Seminar on truthful market design
Rica Gonen, a research scientist at Yahoo! Research, will be at SI to talk about “Characterizing Truthful Market Design” as part of the regular STIET Incentive-Centered Design seminar. The talk will be from 4-5:30 p.m. Thursday, March 26 in 1202 SI North (videocast to 313 State Hall at Wayne State University).
Rica’s research focus is mechanism design or essentially any topic that captures the border between computer science theory, game theory, and microeconomic theory. Among her topics are combinatorial auctions and markets, sponsored search mechanisms, social networks, coalitions, information markets, rational cryptography, rational distributed computation, online algorithms and computation, and approximation algorithms.
Students are invited to a pre-seminar meeting with Rica in 2295 SI North, tentatively scheduled from 2:30-3:30 p.m. You can take a peek at her work beforehand.
Rica has provided the following description of her work:
“Despite the importance of matching-double-sided auctions to market design, to date no characterization of truthful matching-double-sided auctions was made. This paper characterizes truthful mechanisms for matching-double-sided auctions by generalizing Roberts’ classic result to show that truthful matching-double-sided auctions must “almost” be affine maximizers.
“Characterizing truthful matching-double-sided auctions required the creation of a new set of tools, reductions that preserve economic properties. This paper utilizes two such reductions; a truth-preserving reduction and a non-affine preserving reduction. The truth-preserving reduction is used to reduce the matching-double-sided auction to a special case of a combinatorial auction to allow us to make use of the impossibility result proved in Mu’alem and Nisan 2003. Intuitively, our proof shows that truthful matching-double-sided auctions are as hard to design as truthful combinatorial auctions with multi-minded payers.
“In addition to the main result the paper develops two important concepts. First, the form of reduction used in this paper is of independent interest as it presents a solution to the question of how to compare mechanism design problems by design difficulty. Second, we define the notion of extension of payments; which is to say that given a set of payments for some players our extension of payments notion finds payments for the remaining players that maintains the truthful and affine maximization properties.
“The truthful double-sided auction problem for single parameter players is similar to the truthful combinatorial auction problem for single parameter players where many non affine maximizing solutions exist. McAfee’s mechanism provides a non affine maximizing solution for the truthful double-sided auction problem with single parameter players. Our paper focuses on characterizing the case where players are multi minded.”
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