An Axiomatic Approach to Ranking Systems

This talk will survey our recent work in applying the axiomatic approach to ranking systems. Ranking systems are systems in which agents rank each other to produce a social ranking. In the axiomatic approach we study ranking systems under the light of basic properties, or axioms. In this talk I will present our axiomatization theorem for the PageRank ranking system, prove an impossibility and possibility result for general ranking systems, and discuss the issue of incentives in ranking systems. Finally, I will show initial results regarding personalized ranking systems, where a specialized ranking is generated for each agent.

Speaker Bio

Alon Altman is a PhD student at the Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology, under supervision of Prof. Moshe Tennenholtz. While Alon's Masters thesis was about Natural Language Processing, Alon's current research interests include Ranking, Recommender and Reputation Systems, Axiomatic Foundations, AI, Game Theory, Electronic Commerce, and Multi-Agent Systems.