TEARING DOWN THE WALL BETWEEN MECHANISM DESIGN WITH AND WITHOUT MONEY

VINCE CONITZER

DUKE UNIVERSITY

Many mechanism designers (algorithmic or other) draw a sharp line between
mechanism design with money (auctions, exchanges, ...) and without money
(social choice, matching, ...). I will discuss two papers that indicate
that this line is blurrier than it seems. In the first, we study
generalizations of the Vickrey auction to settings where a single agent
wins, but with an arbitrary contract instead of a simple payment. In the
second, we study repeated allocation of a good without payments. Here, we
can create a type of artificial currency that affects future assignment of
the good and that allows us to use modified versions of existing
mechanisms with payments.

Based on:

B. Paul Harrenstein, Mathijs M. de Weerdt, and Vincent Conitzer.
Strategy-Proof Contract Auctions and the Role of Ties. To appear in Games
and Economic Behavior.

Mingyu Guo, Vincent Conitzer, and Daniel Reeves. Competitive Repeated
Allocation Without Payments. Short version appeared in Proceedings of the
Fifth Workshop on Internet and Network Economics (WINE-09), pp. 244-255,
Rome, Italy, 2009.

BIO

Vincent Conitzer is the Sally Dalton Robinson Professor of Computer
Science and Professor of Economics at Duke University. He received Ph.D.
(2006) and M.S. (2003) degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon
University, and an A.B. (2001) degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard
University. His research focuses on computational aspects of
microeconomics, in particular game theory, mechanism design, voting/social
choice, and auctions. This work uses techniques from, and includes
applications to, artificial intelligence and multiagent systems. Conitzer
has received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and
Engineers (PECASE), the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, an NSF CAREER
award, the inaugural Victor Lesser dissertation award, an honorable
mention for the ACM dissertation award, and several awards for papers and
service at the AAAI and AAMAS conferences. He has also been named a Kavli
Fellow, a Bass Fellow, a Sloan Fellow, and one of AI's Ten to Watch. 
Conitzer and Preston McAfee are the founding Editors-in-Chief of the ACM
Transactions on Economics and Computation (TEAC).