Simplicity-Expressiveness Tradeoffs in Mechanism Design

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Felix Fischer, Harvard SEAS
• Monday 28 February 2011, 10:00-11:00
• Small lecture theatre, Microsoft Research Ltd, 7 J J Thomson Avenue (Off Madingley Road), Cambridge.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Microsoft Research Cambridge Talks Admins.

This talk has been canceled/deleted

A fundamental result in mechanism design theory, the so-called revelation principle, asserts that for many questions concerning the existence of mechanisms with a given outcome one can restrict attention to truthful direct revelation-mechanisms. In practice, however, many mechanism use a restricted message space. This motivates the study of the tradeoffs involved in choosing simplified mechanisms, which can sometimes bring benefits in precluding bad or promoting good equilibria, and other times impose costs on welfare and revenue. We study the simplicity-expressiveness tradeoff in two representative settings, sponsored search auctions and combinatorial auctions, each being a canonical example for complete information and incomplete information analysis, respectively. We observe that the amount of information available to the agents plays an important role for the tradeoff between simplicity and expressiveness.

Joint work with Paul Duetting and David Parkes

This talk is part of the Microsoft Research Cambridge, public talks series.

This talk is included in these lists:

This talk is not included in any other list

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.