MECHANISM DESIGN FOR PREDICTION

DAVID PENNOCK

Yahoo Research

Mechanism design, or "inverse game theory" is an engineering arm of
social science. I will discuss some of our work designing mechanisms
to acquire and aggregate information with the goal of making
predictions. I will focus on the engineering questions: How do they
work and why? What factors and goals are most important in their
design? Two somewhat nonstandard objectives are important for good
prediction mechanisms: liquidity and expressiveness. Liquidity ensures
that agents can be compensated for their information at any time, even
when few others are around. I will describe our designs for several
automated market maker algorithms that provide desired levels of
liquidity. An expressive mechanism offers agents flexibility in how
they communicate information; at the extreme, agents can provide any
information they have in any form they like. I will discuss our work
on combinatorial prediction markets that take expressiveness to the
extreme.

BIO

David Pennock is a Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research in
New York City, where he leads a group focused on algorithmic
economics. He has over sixty academic publications relating to
computational issues in electronic commerce and the web, including
papers in PNAS, Science, IEEE Computer, Theoretical Computer Science,
Algorithmica, Electronic Commerce Research, Electronic Markets, AAAI,
EC, WWW, KDD, UAI, SIGIR, ICML, NIPS, INFOCOM, SAINT, ACM SIGCSE, and
VLDB. He has authored two patents and ten patent applications. In
2005, he was named to MIT Technology Review's list of 35 top
technology innovators under age 35. Prior to his current position at
Yahoo!, Dr. Pennock worked as a research scientist at NEC Laboratories
America, a research intern at Microsoft Research, and in 2001 served
as an adjunct professor at Pennsylvania State University. He received
a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan, an
M.S. in Computer Science from Duke University, and a B.S. in Physics
from Duke. Dr. Pennock's work has been featured in Discover Magazine,
New Scientist, CNN, the New York Times, the Economist, Surowieckias
"The Wisdom of Crowds", and several other publications.