Download or read book The Complexity of Optimal Mechanism Design written by Christos Tzamos and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Myerson's seminal work provides a computationally efficient revenue-optimal auction for selling one item to multiple bidders. Generalizing this work to selling multiple items at once has been a central question in economics and algorithmic game theory, but its complexity has remained poorly understood. We answer this question by showing that a revenue-optimal auction in multi-item settings cannot be found and implemented computationally efficiently, unless ZPP = P^#^p. This is true even for a single additive bidder whose values for the items are independently distributed on two rational numbers with rational probabilities. Our result is very general: we show that it is hard to compute any encoding of an optimal auction of any format (direct or indirect, truthful or non-truthful) that can be implemented in expected polynomial time. In particular, under well-believed complexity-theoretic assumptions, revenue-optimization in very simple multi-item settings can only be tractably approximated. We note that our hardness result applies to randomized mechanisms in a very simple setting, and is not an artifact of introducing combinatorial structure to the problem by allowing correlation among item values, introducing combinatorial valuations, or requiring the mechanism to be deterministic (whose structure is readily combinatorial). Our proof is enabled by a flow interpretation of the solutions of an exponential-size linear program for revenue maximization with an additional supermodularity constraint.

Download or read book Twenty Lectures on Algorithmic Game Theory written by Tim Roughgarden and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Computer science and economics have engaged in a lively interaction over the past fifteen years, resulting in the new field of algorithmic game theory. Many problems that are central to modern computer science, ranging from resource allocation in large networks to online advertising, involve interactions between multiple self-interested parties. Economics and game theory offer a host of useful models and definitions to reason about such problems. The flow of ideas also travels in the other direction, and concepts from computer science are increasingly important in economics. This book grew out of the author's Stanford University course on algorithmic game theory, and aims to give students and other newcomers a quick and accessible introduction to many of the most important concepts in the field. The book also includes case studies on online advertising, wireless spectrum auctions, kidney exchange, and network management.

Download or read book Robust Mechanism Design written by Dirk Bergemann and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2012 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foreword by Eric Maskin (Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2007)This volume brings together the collected contributions on the theme of robust mechanism design and robust implementation that Dirk Bergemann and Stephen Morris have been working on for the past decade. The collection is preceded by a comprehensive introductory essay, specifically written for this volume with the aim of providing the readers with an overview of the research agenda pursued in the collected papers.The introduction selectively presents the main results of the papers, and attempts to illustrate many of them in terms of a common and canonical example, namely a single unit auction with interdependent values. It is our hope that the use of this example facilitates the presentation of the results and that it brings the main insights within the context of an important economic mechanism, namely the generalized second price auction.

Download or read book The Complexity of Optimal Auction Design written by Georgios Pierrakos and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation provides a complexity-theoretic critique of Myerson's theorem, one of Mechanism Design's crown jewels, for which Myerson was awarded the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. This theorem gives a remarkably crisp solution to the problem faced by a monopolist wishing to sell a single item to a number of interested, rational bidders, whose valuations for the item are distributed independently according to some given distributions; the monopolist's goal is to design an auction that will maximize her expected revenue, while at the same time incentivizing the bidders to bid their true value for the item. Myerson solves this problem of designing the revenue-maximizing auction, through an elegant transformation of the valuation space, and a reduction to the problem of designing the social welfare-maximizing auction (i.e. allocating the item to the bidder who values it the most). This latter problem is well understood, and it admits a deterministic (i.e. the auctioneer does not have to flip any coins) and simple solution: the Vickrey (or second-price) auction. In the present dissertation we explore the trade-offs between the plausibility of this result and its tractability: First, we consider what happens as we shift away from the simple setting of Myerson to more complex settings, and, in particular, to the case of bidders with arbitrarily correlated valuations. Is a characterization as crisp and elegant as Myerson's still possible? In Chapter 2 we provide a negative answer: we show that, for three or more bidders, the problem of computing a deterministic, ex-post incentive compatible and individually rational auction that maximizes revenue is NP-complete --in fact, inapproximable. Even for the case of two bidders, where, as we show, the revenue-maximizing auction is easy to compute, it admits nonetheless no obvious natural interpretation a-la Myerson. Then, motivated by the subtle interplay between social welfare- and revenue-maximizing auctions implied by Myerson's theorem, we study the trade-off between those two objectives for various types of auctions. We show that, as one moves from the least plausible auction format to the most plausible one, the problem of reconciling revenue and welfare becomes less and less tractable. Indeed, if one is willing to settle for randomized solutions, then auctions that fare well with respect to both objectives simultaneously are possible, as shown by Myerson and Satterthwaite. For deterministic auctions on the other hand, we show in Chapter 3 that it is NP-hard to exactly compute the optimal trade-off (Pareto) curve between those two objectives. On the positive side, we show how this curve can be approximated within arbitrary precision for some settings of interest. Finally, when one is only allowed to use variants of the simple Vickrey auction, we show in Chapter 4 that there exist auctions that achieve constant factor approximations of the optimal revenue and social welfare simultaneously.

Download or read book The Future of Economic Design written by Jean-François Laslier and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays represents responses by over eighty scholars to an unusual request: give your high level assessment of the field of economic design, as broadly construed. Where do we come from? Where do we go from here? The book editors invited short, informal reflections expressing deeply felt but hard to demonstrate opinions, unsupported speculation, and controversial views of a kind one might not normally risk submitting for review. The contributors – both senior researchers who have shaped the field and promising, younger researchers – responded with a diverse collection of provocative pieces, including: retrospective assessments or surveys of the field; opinion papers; reflections on critical points for the development of the discipline; proposals for the immediate future; "science fiction"; and many more. The readers should have fun reading these unusual pieces – as much as the contributors enjoyed writing them.

Download or read book Mechanism Design for Total Quality Management written by Petter Ogland and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2017-11-23 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Mechanism Design for Total Quality Management' is clearly written in a logical manner and points are supported by real life case studies. Dr. Ogland demonstrates how a Total Quality Management strategy articulated through the use of bootstrap algorithms can be used to achieve world-class performance in challenging environments such as complex organisations saturated with power struggles and internal politics. The book features insights on critical systems thinking, game theory, quality management systems, the EFQM Business Excellence Model, self-assessment, and the implementation of TQM. Case studies provide practical insights from twenty years of empirical research on how to bootstrap TQM and Business Excellence in complex environments. The ideas developed in the book have been acknowledged as a major contribution to the theory of TQM, and the book itself is an indispensable resource for practitioners trying to implement TQM in environments where traditional implementation methods are bound to fail.

Download or read book Complexity and Diversity written by K. Kudo and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nonlinear complex open systems show great diversity in the process of self-organization, and that diversity increases as complexity increases. The measurement of complexity and the origins of the diversity of such complex systems are the focus of interdisciplinary studies extending across a wide range of scientific disciplines that include applied mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, ecology, sociology, and economics. Previous investigations have concentrated either on complexity or on diversity, but not both. This volume makes clear the relation between complexity and diversity with examples drawn from various disciplines. Compiles here are presentations from the Complexity and Diversity workshop held in Fugue, Japan, in August 1996. The contributions are the results of research in mathematical systems, physical systems, living systems, and social systems, and are contained in the four corresponding sections of the book. Mathematical expressions for the theory of complexity as a fundamental method along with realistic examples for application of systematic methods provide the reader with ready access to the latest topics in complex systems.

Download or read book Putting Auction Theory to Work written by Paul Milgrom and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-12 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive introduction to modern auction theory and its important new applications. It is written by a leading economic theorist whose suggestions guided the creation of the new spectrum auction designs. Aimed at graduate students and professionals in economics, the book gives the most up-to-date treatments of both traditional theories of 'optimal auctions' and newer theories of multi-unit auctions and package auctions, and shows by example how these theories are used. The analysis explores the limitations of prominent older designs, such as the Vickrey auction design, and evaluates the practical responses to those limitations. It explores the tension between the traditional theory of auctions with a fixed set of bidders, in which the seller seeks to squeeze as much revenue as possible from the fixed set, and the theory of auctions with endogenous entry, in which bidder profits must be respected to encourage participation.

Download or read book An Introduction to the Theory of Mechanism Design written by Tilman Börgers and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is meant for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of economics who have a good understanding of game theory.

Download or read book Game Theory And Mechanism Design written by Y Narahari and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2014-03-13 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a self-sufficient treatment of a key tool, game theory and mechanism design, to model, analyze, and solve centralized as well as decentralized design problems involving multiple autonomous agents that interact strategically in a rational and intelligent way. The contents of the book provide a sound foundation of game theory and mechanism design theory which clearly represent the “science” behind traditional as well as emerging economic applications for the society.The importance of the discipline of game theory has been recognized through numerous Nobel prizes in economic sciences being awarded to game theorists, including the 2005, 2007, and 2012 prizes. The book distills the marvelous contributions of these and other celebrated game theorists and presents it in a way that can be easily understood even by senior undergraduate students.A unique feature of the book is its detailed coverage of mechanism design which is the art of designing a game among strategic agents so that a social goal is realized in an equilibrium of the induced game. Another feature is a large number of illustrative examples that are representative of both classical and modern applications of game theory and mechanism design. The book also includes informative biographical sketches of game theory legends, and is specially customized to a general engineering audience.After a thorough reading of this book, readers would be able to apply game theory and mechanism design in a principled and mature way to solve relevant problems in computer science (esp, artificial intelligence/machine learning), computer engineering, operations research, industrial engineering and microeconomics.

Download or read book Approximately Optimal Mechanism Design written by Tim Roughgarden and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The field of optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, as well as several killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major search engines auction off online advertising. There are, however, some basic problems for which the traditional optimal mechanism design approach is ill suited--either because it makes overly strong assumptions or because it advocates overly complex designs. This article reviews several common issues with optimal mechanisms, including exorbitant communication, computation, and informational requirements; it also presents several examples demonstrating that relaxing the goal to designing an approximately optimal mechanism allows us to reason about fundamental questions that seem out of reach of the traditional theory.

Download or read book Automata Languages and Programming written by Magnús M. Halldórsson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-06-19 with total page 751 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The two-volume set LNCS 9134 and LNCS 9135 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 42nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, ICALP 2015, held in Kyoto, Japan, in July 2015. The 143 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 507 submissions. The papers are organized in the following three tracks: algorithms, complexity, and games; logic, semantics, automata and theory of programming; and foundations of networked computation: models, algorithms and information management.

Download or read book Algorithms ESA 2015 written by Nikhil Bansal and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 1075 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23rd Annual European Symposium on Algorithms, ESA 2015, held in Patras, Greece, in September 2015, as part of ALGO 2015. The 86 revised full papers presented together with two invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 320 initial submissions: 71 out of 261 in Track A, Design and Analysis, and 15 out of 59 in Track B, Engineering and Applications. The papers present real-world applications, engineering, and experimental analysis of algorithms.

Download or read book Mechanism Design written by Rakesh V. Vohra and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mechanism design is an analytical framework for thinking clearly and carefully about what exactly a given institution can achieve when the information necessary to make decisions is dispersed and privately held. This analysis provides an account of the underlying mathematics of mechanism design based on linear programming. Three advantages characterize the approach. The first is simplicity: arguments based on linear programming are both elementary and transparent. The second is unity: the machinery of linear programming provides a way to unify results from disparate areas of mechanism design. The third is reach: the technique offers the ability to solve problems that appear to be beyond solutions offered by traditional methods. No claim is made that the approach advocated should supplant traditional mathematical machinery. Rather, the approach represents an addition to the tools of the economic theorist who proposes to understand economic phenomena through the lens of mechanism design.

Download or read book Web and Internet Economics written by Xujin Chen and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-12-05 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Web and Internet Economics, WINE 2020, held in Beijing, China, in December 2020. The 31 full papers presented together with 11 abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 136 submissions. The issues in theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, operations research are of particular importance in the Web and the Internet that enable the interaction of large and diverse populations. The Conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE) is an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of ideas and results on incentives and computation arising from these various fields.

Download or read book Constrained Majorization written by Afshin Nikzad and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classical frameworks in mechanism design often specify an objective function and maximize it by choosing allocation. We extend these frameworks by allowing maximizing an objective function (such as expected revenue in an auction) subject to additional constraints (such as lower bounds on efficiency or welfare). The additional complexity arising due to each additional constraint manifests in the reduced form of the optimal mechanism as at most one jump discontinuity in an “ironed” interval. We apply our results to demonstrate the simplicity of optimal mechanisms despite the presence of a side constraint in common economic applications such as contract and auction design. We also introduce a regularity condition under which the general structure of optimal mechanisms bears no additional complexity due to the presence of a side constraint. The analysis builds on the findings of Kleiner et al. (2021) by considering optimal mechanisms as extreme points of function spaces.

Download or read book Essays in Optimal Mechanism Design written by Igor Legkiy and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: