COURSE: CS 15-892 Foundations of Electronic Marketplaces
Fall 2011
Summary:The course covers classic and state-of-the-art results on computational and
game-theoretic questions related to electronic marketplaces.
Instructor: Prof.
Tuomas Sandholm (sandholm@cs.cmu.edu)
This page: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/cs15-892F11/cs15-892.htm
Class times: TuTh 10:30-11:50 am, in Gates Hillman
Center (GHC) room 4303.
Instructor’s office hour: Tuesdays, noon-1 pm, GHC 9205.
Reading materials:
There is no book that adequately covers all of the covered
topics. However, we will be using the book Combinatorial Auctions (MIT Press 2006);
each student should acquire that book. In addition, we will use a
collection of readings from recent research papers, chapters that are about to
appear in other books, and slides by the instructor. Some of these papers are brand new, and have
not even appeared publicly yet.
Format:
- Lectures by Prof. Sandholm. In addition, guest lectures by outside experts.
- In advance of each lecture, each student is expected to download the paper
and the slides for that lecture from the course web page, to print them,
and to read the paper carefully before the lecture. There may be surprise quizzes on the
readings.
- Three
homework assignments, which will mostly consist of analytical
questions.
- Final project. Each student is expected to complete an original final project
(alone, or for a larger project, in a pair). The students are free to
pick the topics of the final projects, but they have to be related to the
topic of the course. The projects can involve analytical work, computer experiments, building a prototype,
etc. The project might also involve applying some of the techniques learned in this course to the student’s
research in another area. Two-page project plans are due on October 20th by the beginning of
class. Students are expected to present their final projects in the last couple of lectures.
The writeups of the final projects are due on December 8th (i.e., last class) in the beginning of
class.These are hard deadlines.
Evaluation: Participation 10%, homework assignments
and quizzes 40%, final project 50%. The course must be taken for credit: there is no audit option.
Prerequisites: Knowledge of algorithms and computational complexity. Knowledge of
basic probability theory. This is a full-semester course given by the Computer Science Department primarily to
Ph.D. candidates. However, others may also take it with the instructor's permission.
TOPICS
Here is the set of topics that we will cover, and a list of papers
for each topic. Only some of the papers will be covered (the papers most likely
to be covered are marked in
red). THIS LIST WILL BE UPDATED DYNAMICALLY DURING
THE SEMESTER.
General review articles
- Computing in Mechanism Design. by T. Sandholm. In the New Palgrave Dictionary in Economics, 2008.(PDF)
- Computational Mechanism Design by David C. Parkes. In Lecture notes of Tutorials at 10th Conf. on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK-05), Institute of Mathematical Sciences, University of Singapore, 2008.(PDF)
- "Combinatorial Auctions (a survey)" by Blumrosen and Nisan. Chapter 11 of the book Algorithmic Game Theory.
- “Auctions:Theory” by Lawrence Ausubel. To appear in the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. (PDF)
Basics of mechanism design
In designing (exact or approximate) mechanisms, it can help to know what mechanism families are incentive compatible, and what is
(im)possible:
- Truthful germs are contagious: A local to
global characterization of truthfulness. A. Archer and R. Kleinberg, EC-08.
- A Modular Approach to Roberts' Theorem. Dobzinski and Nisan, SAGT-09.
- Two Simplified
Proofs for Roberts' Theorem. Ron Lavi, Ahuva Mu'alem, and Noam Nisan. Social Choice and Welfare,
32, pp. 407 -- 423, 2009.
- The Limits of Ex Post
Implementation. Philippe Jehiel, Moritz Meyer-ter-Vehn, Benny Moldovanu,
and William R. Zame Econometrica, 2006.
- Ex post implementation. Dirk Bergemann
and Stephen Morris. Games and Economic Behavior 63 (2008) 527-566.
- Multi-Unit Auctions with
Budget Limits. Shahar Dobzinski, Ron Lavi, and Noam Nisan. FOCS-08.
- On Characterizations of Truthful Mechanisms for Combinatorial Auctions and Scheduling. Shahar Dobzinski and Mukund Sundararajan. EC-08. See also the addendum.
- Paths, Cycles and Mechanism Design , by Vohra, 2007.
- Weak
Monotonicity characterizes deterministic dominant strategy implementation
by S. Bikhchandani, S. Chatterji, R. Lavi, A. Mu'alem, N. Nisan, and A. Sen.
Econometrica, 74(4),
pp. 1109 -- 1132, 2006. See also the supplementary material for this paper.
- Characterization of Revenue Equivalence, by B. Heydenreich, Rudolf Muller, Marc Uetz, and Rakesh Vohra, 2007.
-
Characterizing Dominant Strategy Mechanisms with Multi-Dimensional Types. [Gui, Mueller, Vohra 2004 draft]
- Truthful
Mechanism Design for Multi-Dimensional Scheduling via Cycle Monotonicity.
Ron Lavi and Chaitanya Swamy. EC-07.
Auctioning a single item
Optimal (offline) clearing of multi-item and/or multi-unit markets
Expressiveness of mechanisms
- A Theory of Expressiveness in Mechanisms. Michael Benisch and Tuomas Sandholm. Draft, 2011. Very short early version in appeared in AAAI-08.
- Simplicity-Expressiveness Tradeoffs in Mechanism Design. Paul Dutting, Felix Fischer, and David Parkes. EC-11.
- Sandholm, T. 2007. Expressive Commerce and Its Application to Sourcing: How We
Conducted $35 Billion of Generalized Combinatorial Auctions. AI
Magazine, 28(3), 45-58.
- Milgrom, P. Simplified Mechanisms with an Application to Sponsored-Search Auctions. Games and Economic Behavior, Sept 2010, vol 70, Issue 1: 62-70..
- Multi-Keyword Sponsored Search. Peerapong Dhangwatnotai. EC-11.
- Benisch, M., Sadeh, N., and Sandholm, T. Methodology for Designing Reasonably Expressive Mechanisms with Application to Ad Auctions In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). (PDF)
- Boutilier, C., Parkes, D., Sandholm, T., and Walsh, W. 2008. Expressive Banner Ad Auctions and Model-Based Online Optimization for Clearing. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). (PDF)
- Position Auctions with Budgets: Existence and Uniqueness. By Itai Ashlagi, Mark Braverman, Avinatan Hassidim, Ron Lavi, and Moshe Tennenholtz.Draft 2009. (PDF)
- Optimize-and-Dispatch Architecture for Expressive Ad Auctions by David C. Parkes and Tuomas Sandholm. In the Proceedings of First Workshop on Sponsored Search Auctions, 2005.(PDF)
- On Expressing Value Externalities in Position Auctions. Florin Constantin, Malvika Rao, Chien-Chung Huang, and David C. Parkes. AAAI-11.
- Externalities in Keyword Auctions: An Empirical and Theoretical Assessment, R. Gomes, N. Immorlica and E. Markakis, in Proc. 5th Workshop on Ad Auctions (2009). (PDF)
- Sponsored Search with Contexts. Eyal Even-Dar, Michael Kearns, and Jennifer Wortman. WWW-07.
Multi-stage market designs with preference elicitation
- Preference elicitation in combinatorial auctions [Sandholm-Boutilier
Chapter 10 in the book “Combinatorial Auctions”, 2006]
-
Iterative combinatorial auctions (iBundle etc.) [Parkes’s
chapter in the forthcoming book “Combinatorial Auctions” 2006] [OLD:
Parkes ACM-EC-99,
AAAI-00a,
AAAI-00b]
- A Kernel-Based Iterative Combinatorial Auction. Sebastien Lahaie, EC-11.
- The Communication Requirements of Combinatorial Allocation Problems. By Ilya Segal,
Chapter 11 of the book Combinatorial Auctions, 2006.
- Ascending Price Vickrey Auctions for General Valuations (PDF) by Debasis Mishra and David C. Parkes. Journal of Economic Theory 132, 2007.
- Exponential Communication Inefficiency of Demand Queries
by N. Nisan and I. Segal. TARK 2005.
- Multi-Item Vickrey-Dutch Auctions (PDF) Draft by Debasis
Mishra and David C. Parkes, 2007.
- Communication complexity of approximate set packing and covering [Nisan
01]
- Linear programming and Vickrey auctions [Vohra et al. draft 01]
- Dynamic auction for multiple distinguishable items [Ausubel 00] (slides from Nisan’s course)
- AkBA [Wurman et al ACM-EC-00]
- Auction Design with Costly Preference Elicitation (PDF) by David C. Parkes. In Annals of Mathematics and AI 44, 2005, pages 269-302.
Automated mechanism design
Work on the general problem
- Sandholm, T., Conitzer, V., and Boutilier, C. 2007. Automated
Design of Multistage Mechanisms. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).
- Conitzer, V. and Sandholm, T. 2007.Incremental
Mechanism Design. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on
Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).
- Conitzer, V. and Sandholm, T. 2004. Self-Interested
Automated Mechanism Design and Implications for Optimal Combinatorial Auctions.In
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC), pp. 132-141.
- Conitzer, V. and Sandholm, T. 2004. An Algorithm
for Automatically Designing Deterministic Mechanisms without Payments. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), pp. 128-135, New York, July 19-23.
- Conitzer, V. and Sandholm, T. 2003.Applications
of automated mechanism design. In Proceedings of the UAI Bayesian
Modeling Applications Workshop, Acapulco, Mexico. Extended version.
- Conitzer, V. and Sandholm, T. 2003.Automated
mechanism design with a structured outcome space. Draft.
- Conitzer, V. and Sandholm, T. 2002. Complexity of Mechanism Design. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), August 1-4, Edmonton, Canada.
- Conitzer, V. and Sandholm, T. 2003.Automated
Mechanism Design: Complexity Results Stemming from the Single-Agent Setting.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC), Pittsburgh,
September 30 – October 3.
Work on auctions, other selling mechanisms, etc.
- Automated Design of Revenue-Maximizing Combinatorial Auctions. Tuomas Sandholm, Anton Likhodedov, and Andrew Gilpin. Operations Research, to appear. Combines and extends over a AAAI-05 paper and a AAAI-04 paper.
- Sandholm, T. and Gilpin, A. 2003. Sequences of
Take-It-or-Leave-It Offers: Near-Optimal Auctions without Full Valuation
Revelation. In Proceedings of the AAMAS workshop on Agent-Mediated
Electronic Commerce (AMEC V), Melbourne,Australia
- Likhodedov, A. and Sandholm, T. 2004. Mechanism for Optimally Trading Off Revenue and Efficiency in Multi-unit Auctions.Short
paper in proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce. Extended
version. in Proceedings of the AAMAS workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC V),
Melbourne, Australia, 2003.)
- On approximating optimal auctions [Ronen
EC-01]
- R. Jurca and B. Faltings. Collusion
Resistant, Incentive Compatible Feedback Payments. Proceedings of the
ACM Conference on E-Commerce (EC'07), pp. 200-209, San Diego June 11-15 2007.
- R. Jurca and B. Faltings. Minimum
Payments that Reward Honest Reputation Feedback. Proceedings of the ACM
Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC2006), pp. 190-199, Ann Arbor,
Michigan, June 11-15 2006.
Auction and exchange design without priors
Incentive-compatible (IC) approximation by the auctioneer
- Multi-Unit Auctions: Beyond Roberts. Shahar Dobzinski and Noam Nisan. EC-11.
- VC v. VCG: Inapproximability of Combinatorial Auctions via Generalizations of the VC Dimension. Elchanan Mossel, Christos Papadimitriou, Michael Schapira, and Yaron Singer.
- Computation and Incentives in Combinatorial Public Projects. Dave Buchfuhrer, Michael Schapira, and Yaron Singer.
- Bayesian Mechanism Design for Budget-Constrained Agents. Shuchi Chawla, David Malec, and Azarakhsh Malekian. EC-11.
- Computationally-Efficient Approximation Mechanisms. Chapter by Lavi in the
book Algorithmic Game Theory.
- Algorithmic mechanism design [Nisan-Ronen GEB 2001]
- Truth revelation in rapid approximately efficient combinatorial auctions [Lehman-O’Callaghan-Shoham JACM-02]
- Truthful and Near-optimal Mechanism Design via Linear
Programming, by Ron Lavi and Chaitanya Swamy (early version in FOCS-05).
- On the Power of
Randomization in Algorithmic Mechanism Design, FOCS-09. Shahar Dobzinski and Shaddin Dughmi.
- Truthful Randomized
Mechanisms for Combinatorial Auctions by S. Dobzinski, N. Nisan, and M.
Schapira. STOC 2006.
- Impersonation-Based
Mechanisms, By Moshe Babaioff, Ron Lavi, and Elan Pavlov, AAAI-06.
- Two Randomized Mechanisms
for Combinatorial Auctions by S. Dobzinski, APPROX-08.
- Limitations of VCG-based Mechanisms by S. Dobzinski and N. Nisan. STOC 2007.
- Mechanisms for Multi-Unit
Auctions by S. Dobzinski and N. Nisan. EC-07.
- Algorithms for selfish agents [Nisan 01]
- Computationally feasible VCG mechanism [Nisan-Ronen 00]
- Algorithms for rational agents [Ronen]
– Section 7 (if not subsumed by Ronen’s EC-01 paper)
- Mechanism design for resource-bounded agents [Monderer-Tennenholtz-Kfir Dahav ICMAS-00]
Bidding agents with hard valuation problems
- Dominant-Strategy Auction Design for Agents with Uncertain, Private Values. David R. M. Thompson and Kevin Leyton-Brown. AAAI-11.
- Efficient Metadeliberation
Auctions.Cavallo and Parkes, AAAI-08.
- Larson, K. and Sandholm, T. 2005. Mechanism Design and Deliberative Agents. Proceedings of the International Joint Conference
on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS)
- Larson, K. and Sandholm, T. 2001. Costly Valuation Computation in Auctions. In Proceedings of theTheoretical
Aspects of Reasoning about Knowledge (TARK)
- Larson, K. and Sandholm, T. 2001. Computationally
Limited Agents in Auctions. In Proceedings of the International
Conference on Autonomous Agents, Workshop on Agent-based Approaches to B2B.
- Issues in computational Vickrey auctions [Sandholm IJEC-00
(originally ICMAS-96)]
- Valuation complexity explains last-minute bidding [Eric Rasmusen draft-03]
- Computationally feasible VCG mechanism [Nisan-Ronen 00] (This paper contains the second-chance mechanism and the maximal-in-range approach.)
- Ben-Sasson, E., Kalai, A., and Kalai E. An
Approach to Bounded Rationality. NIPS. (This is not really about valuation calculation, but has some results
about strategies with costs.)
Avoiding manipulation using computational complexity;
Mechanism design for computationally limited agents; Non-truth-promoting
mechanisms
- Approximately Strategy-Proof Voting. Eleanor Birrell and Rafael Pass. IJCAI-11.
- Othman, A. and Sandholm, T. 2009. Better
with Byzantine: Manipulation-Optimal Mechanisms. In
Proceedings of the Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory (SAGT).
- Conitzer, V. and Sandholm, T. 2003. Computational Criticisms of the Revelation
Principle. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC V).
Newer draft.
- Conitzer, V., Sandholm, T., and Lang, J. 2007. When Are Elections with Few Candidates Hard to Manipulate? Journal
of the ACM, 54(3).
- Conitzer, V. and Sandholm, T. 2003. Universal Voting Protocol Tweaks to Make Manipulation Hard.
In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).
- Conitzer, V. and Sandholm, T. 2006. Nonexistence of Voting Rules That Are Usually Hard to Manipulate. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
- Ariel D. Procaccia and Jeffrey S. Rosenschein. 2007. Junta
Distributions and the Average-Case Complexity of Manipulating Elections.
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. Volume 28, pages 157-181. [PDF]
- The Geometry of Manipulation - a Quantitative Proof of the Gibbard Satterthwaite Theorem. Marcus Isaksson, Guy Kindler, and Elchanan Mossel. FOCS-10. This is for 4 or more candidates.
- A Quantitative Version of the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem for Three Alternatives. E. Friedgut, G. Kalai, N. Keller and N. Nisan. Preliminary version titled "Elections can be Manipulated Often" appeared in FOCS 2008.
Online mechanisms
- Online Mechanisms, by David Parkes. Chapter in Algorithmic Game Theory.
- Self-Correcting Sampling-Based Dynamic Multi-Unit Auctions. By Florin Constantin and David C. Parkes. Bonn workshop on mechanism
design, 2009.
- Self-Correcting
Sampling-Based Dynamic Multi-Unit Auctions. by Florin Constantin and David C. Parkes. EC-09.
- Learning
About The Future and Dynamic Efficiency, Alex Gershkov and Benny
Moldovanu, forthcoming in American Economic Review.
- Dynamic
Revenue Maximization with Heterogeneous Objects: A Mechanism Design Approach. Alex Gershkov and Benny Moldovanu, American
Economic Journal: Microeconomics, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2009.
- An Efficient Dynamic Mechanism, Susan
Athey and Ilya Segal, 2007.
- The Dynamic Pivot Mechanism. Dirk Bergemann and Juuso Välimäki. Econometrica, (2010) 78: 771-789.
- Efficient Sequential Assignment with Incomplete Information, Alex
Gershkov and Benny Moldovanu, forthcoming in Games and Economic Behaviour.
- Efficiency Levels in Sequential Auctions with Dynamic Arrivals Lavi and Segev. Draft 2009.
- Prompt Mechanisms for Online Auctions. Richard Cole, Shahar Dobzinski, and Lisa
Fleischer. SAGT-08
- Online
algorithms for market clearing Blum-Sandholm-Zinkevich.
JACM, 2006
- Automated
Online Mechanism Design and Prophet Inequalities. Hajiaghayi, M., Kleinberg, R., and Sandholm, T., AAAI-07.
- An
Ironing-Based Approach to Adaptive Online Mechanism Design in Single-Valued
Domains by David C. Parkes and Quang Duong, AAAI-07.
- Chain:
A dynamic double auction framework by Jonathan Bredin, David C. Parkes, and Quang Duong. In Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2007.
- Competitive Analysis of Incentive Compatible On-Line
Auctions by Ron Lavi and Noam Nisan. Theoretical Computer Science 310(1),
pp. 159-180, 2004.
- Online auctions with reusable goods [Hajiaghayi et al. EC-05]
- Reducing truth-telling online mechanisms to online optimization [Awerbuch et al.
STOC-03]
- Online learning in online auctions [Blum et al. SODA-03
- Pricing WiFi at Starbucks: Issues in online mechanism design [Friedman & Parkes
EC-03]
- Adaptive limited-supply online auctions Hajiaghayi et al. EC-04
- Approximately efficient online mechanism design Parkes, Singh and Yanovsky NIPS-04
- An MDP-Based Approach to Online Mechanism Design D. C. Parkes and S. Singh, Proc. NIPS'03, 2003.
- The price of truth: frugality in truthful mechanisms [Talwar STOC-03]
RELATED EXCITING TOPICS (which we will probably not have time to cover in class)
Externalities
- Money for Nothing: Exploiting Negative Externalities. Changrong Deng and Saša Pekec. EC-11.
- Krysta, P., Michalak, T., Sandholm, T., and Wooldridge, M. 2010. Combinatorial Auctions with Externalities. Extended version of AAMAS-10 paper.
- Conitzer,
V. and Sandholm, T. Computing Optimal Outcomes under an Expressive Representation of Settings with Externalities. Journal of Computer and System Sciences (JCSS), special issue on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, to appear. Early version in AAAI-05.
- Conitzer,
V. and Sandholm, T. 2011. Expressive Markets for Donating to Charities. Artificial Intelligence, 175(7-8), 1251-1271, special issue on Representing, Processing, and Learning Preferences: Theoretical and Practical Challenges. Early version in EC-04.
- Boutilier, C., Parkes, D., Sandholm, T., and Walsh, W. 2008. Expressive Banner Ad Auctions and Model-Based Online Optimization for Clearing. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). (PDF)
- Optimize-and-Dispatch Architecture for Expressive Ad Auctions by David C. Parkes and Tuomas Sandholm. In the Proceedings of First Workshop on Sponsored Search Auctions, 2005.(PDF)
- Externalities in Keyword Auctions: An Empirical and Theoretical Assessment, R. Gomes, N. Immorlica and E. Markakis, in Proc. 5th Workshop on Ad Auctions (2009). (PDF)
- On Expressing Value Externalities in Position Auctions. Florin Constantin, Malvika Rao, Chien-Chung Huang, and David C. Parkes. AAAI-11.
Kidney exchange (there are lots of papers on other matching markets; ask me
for more)
- Online Stochastic Optimization in the Large: Application to Kidney Exchange. Pranjal Awasthi and Tuomas Sandholm. In Proceedings of the International
Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2009. (PDF)
- Dynamic Kidney Exchange. Utku Unver. Review of Economic Studies, 2010.
- A Nonsimultaneous, Extended, Altruistic-Donor Chain. Rees, M., Kopke, J., Pelletier, R., Segev, D., Rutter, M., Fabrega, A., Rogers, J.,
Pankewycz, O., Hiller, J., Roth, A., Sandholm, T., Ünver, U., and Montgomery,
R. New
England Journal of Medicine 360(11), 1096-1101, 2009. (PDF)
- Clearing Algorithms for Barter Exchange Markets: Enabling
Nationwide Kidney Exchanges. Abraham, D., Blum, A., and Sandholm, T. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC), 2007. (PDF)
- Individual Rationality and Participation in Large Scale, Multi-hospital Kidney Exchange. Itai Ashlagi and Alvin E. Roth. EC-11.
- Al Roth’s Game Theory, Experimental Economics, and Market Design Page. This page has lots of pointers to other matching markets as well.
Prediction markets
- An Efficient Monte-Carlo Algorithm for Pricing Combinatorial Prediction Markets for Tournaments. Lirong Xia and David M. Pennock. IJCAI-11.
- An Optimization-Based Framework for Automated Market-Making. Jacob Abernethy, Yiling Chen, and Jennifer Wortman Vaughan. EC-11.
- Only Valuable Experts Can Be Valued. Moshe Babaioff, Liad Blumrosen, Nicolas Lambert, and Omer Reingold. EC-11.
- Othman, A. and Sandholm, T. 2011. Automated Market Makers That Enable New Settings: Extending Constant-Utility Cost Functions. In Proceedings of the Conference on Auctions, Market Mechanisms and Their Applications (AMMA).
- Othman, A. and Sandholm, T. 2010. Automated Market-Making in the Large: The Gates Hillman Prediction Market. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC).
- Othman, A., Pennock, D., Reeves, D., and Sandholm, T. 2010. A Practical Liquidity-Sensitive Automated Market Maker. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC).
- Othman, A. and Sandholm, T. 2010. Decision Rules and Decision Markets. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous
Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS).
- Othman, A. and Sandholm, T. 2010. When Do Markets with Simple Agents Fail? In Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous
Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS).
- Computational Aspects of Prediction Markets, Chapter 26 of Algorithmic Game Theory.
Advertising markets (e.g., sponsored search auctions, display ad markets, TV ad markets,
print ads, etc.)
- Walsh, W., Boutilier, C., Sandholm, T., Shields, R., Nemhauser, G., and Parkes, D., 2009. Automated Channel Abstraction for Advertising Auctions. In Proceedings of the Ad Auctions Workshop. (PDF)
- Multi-Keyword Sponsored Search. Peerapong Dhangwatnotai. EC-11.
- Reserve Prices in Internet Advertising Auctions: A Field Experiment. Michael Ostrovsky and Michael Schwarz. EC-11.
- Yield Optimization of Display Advertising with Ad Exchange. Santiago Balseiro, Jon Feldman, Vahab Mirrokni, and S. Muthukrishnan. Extended version of EC-11 paper.
- Near Optimal Online Algorithms and Fast Approximation Algorithms for Resource Allocation Problems. Nikhil Devanur, Kamal Jain,
Balasubramanian Sivan, and Christopher A. Wilkens. EC-11.
- On Expressing Value Externalities in Position Auctions. Florin Constantin, Malvika Rao, Chien-Chung Huang, and David C. Parkes. AAAI-11.
- "Sponsored Search Auctions", by Lahaie/Pennock/Saberi/Vohra. Chapter 28 of the book Algorithmic Game Theory, 2007. (PDF)
- Benisch, M., Sadeh, N., and Sandholm, T. Methodology for Designing Reasonably Expressive Mechanisms with Application to Ad Auctions In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). (PDF)
- Boutilier, C., Parkes, D., Sandholm, T., and Walsh, W. 2008. Expressive Banner Ad Auctions and Model-Based Online Optimization for Clearing. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). (PDF)
- Google's auction for TV ads, N. Nisan et al., ICALPS 2009 (PDF)
- Pricing guidance in ad sale negotiations: The PrintAds example, A. Juda, S. Muthukrishnan and A. Ratogi, in 3rd. Int. W. on Data Mining and Audience Intelligence for Advertising, 2009. (PDF)
- Computational analysis of perfect-information position auctions, D. Thompson and K. Leyton-Brown, in Proc. ACM EC'09, 2009. (PDF)
- Position Auctions with Budgets: Existence and Uniqueness. By Itai Ashlagi, Mark Braverman, Avinatan Hassidim, Ron Lavi, and Moshe Tennenholtz.Draft 2009. (PDF)
- T. Roughgarden and M. Sundararajan, Is Efficiency Expensive?, 3rd Workshop on Sponsored Search, 2007. (PDF)
- H. Varian. Position Auctions To appear in International Journal of Industrial Organization. (A theoretical and empirical analysis of the search keyword auction used by Google and Yahoo.) (PDF)
- Internet Advertising and the Generalized Second Price Auction: Selling Billions of Dollars Worth of Keywords. By M. Schwartz, B. Edelman and M. Ostrovsky. (PDF)
- Optimize-and-Dispatch Architecture for Expressive Ad Auctions by David C. Parkes and Tuomas Sandholm. In the Proceedings of First Workshop on Sponsored Search Auctions, 2005.(PDF)
- J. Tomlin, Z. Abrams and O. Mendelevitch. Optimal delivery of sponsored search advertisements subject to budget constraints. In Proc. ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'07), pp. 272-278, 2007. (PDF)
- Externalities in Keyword Auctions: An Empirical and Theoretical Assessment, R. Gomes, N. Immorlica and E. Markakis, in Proc. 5th Workshop on Ad Auctions (2009). (PDF)
- Sponsored search auctions with Markovian users, G. Aggarwal, J. Feldman, S. Muthukrishnan, and M. Pal. In Proc. 4th Workshop on Ad Auctions (2008). (PDF)
- Sponsored Search with Contexts. Eyal Even-Dar, Michael Kearns, and Jennifer Wortman. WWW-07.
- Bid Optimization for Broad Match Ad Auctions. Eyal Even-Dar, Yishay Mansour, Vahab S. Mirrokni, S. Muthukrishnan, Uri Nadav. WWW-09.
- OTHER PAPERS, e.g., on bid optimization
Core-selecting combinatorial auctions
Distributed implementation
- MDPOP:Faithful Distributed Implementation of Efficient Social Choice Problems by Adrian Petcu, Boi Faltings, and David C. Parkes. In the Proc. 5th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems(AAMAS), pages 1397-1404, 2006.(PDF)
- Specification Faithfulness in Networks with Rational Nodes by Jeffrey Shneidman and David C. Parkes. In the Proc. 23rd ACM Symp. on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), St. John's, Canada, pages 88-97, 2004.(PDF)
- Distributed computing meets game theory: robust mechanisms for rational secret sharing and multiparty computation, Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, 2006, pp. 53-62 (J. Halpern, I. Abraham, D. Dolev, and R. Gonen). (PDF)
- Rational secret sharing and multiparty computation, Proceedings of 36th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, 2004, pp. 623-632 (J. Halpern and V. Teague). (PDF)
- J. Feigenbaum, C. Papadimitriou, R. Sami, and S. Shenker, A BGP-based Mechanism for Lowest-Cost Routing, Distributed Computing 18 (2005), pp. 61-72. (PDF)
- J. Feigenbaum, M. Schapira, and S. Shenker, Distributed Algorithmic Mechanism Design, to appear in Algorithmic Game Theory, Cambridge University Press, 2007. (PDF)
Privacy in mechanism design
- Selling Privacy at Auction. Arpita Ghosh and Aaron Roth. EC-11.
- Efficiency and Privacy Tradeoffs in Mechanism Design. Xin Sui and Craig Boutilier. AAAI-11.
- Brandt, F. and Sandholm, T. 2008.On the Existence of Unconditionally Privacy-Preserving
Auction Protocols. ACM Transactions on Information and System Security.(PDF)
- Brandt, F. and Sandholm, T. 2005. Unconditional Privacy in Social Choice. In Proceedings of the Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning about Knowledge (TARK) conference.
- Brandt, F. and Sandholm, T. Efficient Privacy-Preserving Protocols for Multi-Unit Auctions. International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC), LNCS 3570. (PDF)
- Brandt, F. and Sandholm, T. 2005. Decentralized Voting with Unconditional Privacy. AAMAS-05.(PDF)
- Brandt, F. and Sandholm, T. 2004. On Correctness and Privacy in Distributed Mechanisms In Proceedings of
the Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce(AMEC) workshop, Springer LNAI 3937. (PDF)
- Sergei Izmalkov, Matt Lepinski and Silvio Micali. 2005. Rational Secure Computation and Ideal Mechanism Design.
FOCS. Relies on a ballot box.
- Practical Secrecy-Preserving, Verifiably Correct and Trustworthy Auctions by David C.
Parkes, Michael O. Rabin, Stuart M. Shieber, and Christopher Thorpe., In Electronic Commerce
Research and Applications, 2007, to appear. (PDF)
- Cryptographic Securities Exchanges by Christopher Thorpe and David C. Parkes. In Proc. International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, 2007.
Dynamically auctioning wireless spectrum (by the way, Google advocates dynamic provisioning
to the FCC, and there is talk of such in Ireland as well)
- A General Framework for Clearing Auction of Wireless Spectrum. Sorabh
Gandhi, Chiranjeeb Buragohain, Lili Cao, Haitao Zheng and Subhash Suri. IEEE
DySPAN'07, 2007.
Holdouts, eminent domain, corporate takeovers, and how to get old inefficient holders of radio spectrum to release it
Exotic contract types (“It’s not the figures lying, it’s the liars figuring” -- Mark Twain)
- Leveled commitment contracts and strategic breach, Sandholm-Lesser GEB 2001 (PDF)
- Sandholm, T. and Zhou, Y. 2002. Surplus Equivalence of Leveled Commitment Contracts. Artificial Intelligence 142, 239-264. (PDF)
- Algorithms for optimizing leveled commitment contracts Sandholm-Sikka-Norden IJCAI-99 (PS)
- Efficient Mechanisms with Risky Participation. Ruggiero Cavallo. IJCAI-11. (Could this be applied to make leveled commitment contracts work without knowledge of possible futures?)
Coalition formation
Basics: core, Shapley value, Sandholm’s network routing example, iterative payoff
division schemes
- Minimum Search To Establish Worst-Case Guarantees in Coalition Structure Generation. Talal Rahwan, Tomasz Michalak, and Nicholas R. Jennings. IJCAI-11.
- Coalition structure generation with worst case guarantees. Sandholm et al AIJ-99
(PDF)
- Computing Shapley values, manipulating value division schemes, and checking core membership in multi-issue domains. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 219-225, 2004. Conitzer and
Sandholm.(PDF)
- Marginal Contribution Nets: A Compact Representation Scheme for Coalitional Games.
S. Ieong, Y. Shoham., EC-05. (PDF)
- Complexity of Constructing Solutions in the Core Based on Synergies Among Coalitions. Artificial Intelligence, 170: 607-619, 2006, Conitzer and Sandholm.(PDF)
- Coalition formation among agents whose computation is costly. Sandholm & Lesser AIJ-97 (PDF)
- Sharing the cost of multicast transmissions. Feigenbaum et al. (PDF)
- Coalition-proof implementation via LP duality. Vazirani et al
- Yokoo, M., Conitzer, V., Sandholm, T., Ohta., N., and Iwasaki, A., 2005.
Coalitional Games in Open Anonymous Environments. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Pittsburgh, PA. (PDF)
- Ohta, N., Iwasaki, A., Yokoo, M., Maruono, K., Conitzer, V., and Sandholm, T., 2006. A Compact Representation Scheme for Coalitional Games in Open Anonymous Environments. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial
Intelligence (AAAI). (PDF)
Social networks and multi-level marketing
Safe exchange
- Incentive-Compatible Escrow Mechanisms. Jens Witkowski, Sven Seuken, and David C. Parkes. AAAI-11.
- Sandholm, T. and Wang, X. 2002. (Im)possibility of Safe Exchange Mechanism Design. National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). (PDF)
- Safe exchange planner, Sandholm-Ferrandon ICMAS-00 (PDF)
- Defection-free exchange mechanisms for information goods Yokoo ICMAS-00 (IEEE Link)
- Cryptographic safe exchange techniques
- Automated escrow services
Best-response auctions
Reputation systems (these systems are prevalent - e.g., eBay - but they are all
manipulable)
- "Manipulation-Resistant Reputation Systems", by Friedman/Resnick/Sami., Chapter 27 of the book
Algorithmic Game Theory, Nisan, Roughgarden, Tardos, and Vazirani (eds.),Cambridge University Press, 2007. (PDF)
- R. Jurca and B. Faltings. Collusion Resistant, Incentive Compatible Feedback Payments. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on E-Commerce (EC'07), pp. 200-209, 2007. (PDF)
- R. Jurca and B. Faltings.Minimum Payments that Reward Honest Reputation Feedback.
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC2006), pp.190-199, 2006. (PDF)
- Constructing Speculative Demand Functions in Equilibrium Markets Sandholm-Ygge 99 (PS)
- Bargaining with deadlines (Extended version of Sandholm-Vulkan AAAI-99) (PDF)
- "Combinatorial auctions with false-name bidders" (Yokoo’s chapter in the MIT Press book
Combinatorial Auctions, 2006)
Cost sharing
- Mehta, T. Roughgarden, and M. Sundararajan, Beyond Moulin Mechanisms, EC '07. (PDF)
Worst-case Nash equilibrium (what’s the price of anarchy?)
- Entire section on this in the book Algorithmic Game Theory (PDF)
- How bad is selfish routing? Roughgarten & Tardos, 2001. (PDF)
COURSE SCHEDULE (this will change during the semester)
- Sep 13: Course organization. Introduction. Automated negotiation in different
stages of an ecommerce transaction. Utility theory. Measures of
how good an interaction mechanism is. Slides. Read this brief overview paper from the
Palgrave Dictionary of Economics 2008 regarding the topics in this course.
- Sep 15: Extensive form and matrix form representations
of games. Dominant strategy equilibrium. Nash equilibrium. Mixed strategy Nash equilibrium.
Subgame perfect equilibrium and credible threats. Software as a commitment device. Bayesian games.
Bayes Nash equilibrium. Perfect Bayesian equilibrium. Sequential equilibrium. Strong Nash equilibrium.
Coalition-proof Nash equilibrium. Ex post equilibrium. Slides.
- Sep 20: Social choice theory (preference aggregation). Binary protocol. Plurality rule. Borda count.
Paradoxes in social choice. Arrow’s impossibility theorem (weak version). Arrow’s impossibility
theorem (strong version). Voting protocols that circumvent Arrow’s impossibility. Read Sections 9.1-9.2.3 of
Algorithmic Game Theory Slides.
- Sep 22: Homework 1 posted. Mechanism design. Revelation principle. Dominant strategy implementation. Gibbard-Satterthwaite impossibility
theorem. Groves mechanism for quasilinear environments. Read Sections 9.2.4-9.4.3 of Algorithmic Game Theory
Slides.
- Sep 27: When is the Groves mechanism the only family that works? Clarke tax. Budget imbalance. Collusion. More on characterizing dominant-strategy implementation in quasilinear environments: Robert's theorem, single-parameter environments, weak monotonicity, essential uniqueness of prices. Read rest of Chapter 9 of
Algorithmic Game Theory Slides
Additional optional readings: review of
network view of incentive compatibility.
- Sep 29: Bayes-Nash implementation in incomplete information environments. Expected externality mechanism
for quasilinear environments. Budget balance. Participation constraints. Myerson-Satterthwaite impossibility for
exchanges. Additional optional readings: virtual
Bayesian implementation. Slides.
- Oct 4: Homework 1 due in the beginning of class. Auctioning a single item. Private vs. correlated vs. common value auction settings.
English, Japanese, Dutch, first-price sealed-bid, and second-price sealed bid (Vickrey) auction mechanisms.
Revenue equivalence theorem.
Slides.
- Oct 6: More on auctioning a single item. Revenue non-equivalence. Revenue-maximizing (Myerson) auction.
Winner’s curse. Asymmetric information.
- Oct 11: More on auctioning a single item. Single-crossing property and its implications. Linkage principle. Auctions with multi-dimensional signals. Collusion.
Auctions where bidders can invest effort/computation to determine their own valuations.
- Oct 13: Guest lecture: Abe Othman. Prediction markets.
Slides.
- Oct 18: Homework 2 posted. Last-minute bidding (sniping) and its
strategic implications. Mobile bidder agents. Multi-unit auctions. Uniform-price auction. Demand reduction lie. Multi-unit Vickrey auctions. Bidding languages
(price bids; PQ bids; PQ bids with XORs, with OR-of-XORs, with XOR-of-ORs, and with OR*; price-quantity graph bids).
Computational complexity of clearing auctions, reverse auctions, and exchanges under the different bidding
languages - with nondiscriminatory and discriminatory pricing. Slides.
- Oct 20: Project proposals due (by email to Prof. Sandholm) by the beginning of class.Multi-item auctions. Sequential auction mechanisms. Parallel auction mechanisms. Combinatorial
auctions. Approaches to winner determination in combinatorial auctions. Bidding languages.
Read Chapter 14 of Combinatorial Auctions book. Additional optional reading: Chapter 12 of Combinatorial Auctions
book.
Slides.
- Oct 25: Guest lecture: Ariel Procaccia.
Fair division:
allocation of divisible goods (cake cutting algorithms, allocation of multiple resources under proportional demands).
- Oct 27: Guest lecture: Ariel Procaccia.
Fair division:
allocation of indivisible goods
(communication requirements of minimizing envy, algorithms for minimizing envy, negotiation protocols that converge to envy-free and efficient allocations).
- Nov 1:
Homework 2 due in the beginning of class.
Tree search-based winner determination algorithms, including mixed integer programming. Generalized Vickrey auction.
Side constraints and non-price attributes in markets.
Branch-and-cut. Cutting planes.
- Nov 3:
More on tree search-based winner determination algorithms. Deriving the Gomory mixed integer cutting plane. Problem formulations. Identifying and using decomposition (and driving toward decomposition). Branching rules.
- Nov 8:
More on tree search-based winner determination algorithms. Multi-variate branching. Identifying and solving polynomial cases at tree nodes. Multi-unit combinatorial auctions. Combinatorial reverse
auctions. Combinatorial exchanges. Free disposal versus not. Combinatorial reserve prices. Partially acceptable bids. Complexity of clearing these generalized markets.
- Nov 10:
Preference elicitation in
combinatorial auctions. Read Chapter 10 of Combinatorial Auctions book.
Slides.
- Nov 15: Guest lecture: Avrim Blum.
Machine Learning for Online Decision Making + Applications to Online Pricing. Slides.
- Nov 17:
More on preference elicitation in combinatorial auctions. Ascending (and descending) combinatorial auctions. Primal-dual approaches. Read Chapter 2 of Combinatorial
Auctions book.
Slides.
- Nov 22:
Homework 3 posted. Automated mechanism design. Complexity. Applications. Revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions.
Affine maximizer combinatorial auctions. Virtual valuations combinatorial auctions. Automated design
of multi-stage mechanisms.
Slides.
- Nov 24: NO CLASS: Thanksgiving break.
- Nov 29:
Bidding agents with hard valuation problems. Mechanism design for such agents. Nonexistence of
incentive-compatible mechanisms. Slides. Benefits of non-truth-promoting mechanisms. Possibility and impossibility of
manipulation-optimal mechanisms. Second-chance mechanism. Assuming agents can only solve problems that are worst-case
polynomial time. Easiness of typical cases of manipulation problems. Slides.
- Dec 1: Homework 3 due in the beginning of class. Final project presentations: John Dickerson, Nisarg Shah.
- Dec 6: Final project presentations: Sidd Jain, Bill Garrison, Geoff Hasker.
- Dec 8: (last class): Final project presentations: Jeremiah Blocki, Gabriel Moreno, Patrick Xia. Final project writeups due: HARD DEADLINE.
Other resources
Tuomas Sandholm’s home page
Al Roth's Game Theory, Experimental Economics,
and Market Design Page
Al Roth’s Market Design Ideas Page
Related courses at other universities
David Parkes’s course
Computational Mechanism Design at Harvard
Al Roth and Peter Coles’s course
Market Design at Harvard
Noam Nisan’s course at Hebrew University, Israel
Utku Ünver’s Homepage at Boston College
Robert Wilson’s course
Multiperson Decision Theory at Stanford
Tim Roughgarden’s course
Introduction to Algorithmic Game Theory at Stanford
Christos Papadimitriou’s course
Algorithmic Game Theoryat University of California, Berkeley
Joan Feigenbaum’s
courses at Yale University
Amy Greenwald’s at Brown University
Yoav Shoham’s course
Multi Agent Systems at Stanford