CATS-May-8-2015
Title[edit]
Computing on Strategic Inputs
Speaker[edit]
Ahmed Abdelkader
Abstract[edit]
Algorithmic mechanism design centers around the following question: How much harder is optimizing an objective over inputs that are furnished by rational agents compared to when the inputs are known? We present computationally efficient, approximation-preserving reductions from mechanism design (i.e.optimizing over rational inputs) to algorithm design (i.e. optimizing over known inputs) in general Bayesian settings. We also explore whether structural properties about optimal mechanisms can be inferred from these reductions. As an application, we present extensions of Myerson's celebrated single-item auction to multi-item settings.
Bio[edit]
Constantinos Daskalakis is the x-window consortium associate professor of computer science at MIT. He holds a diploma in electrical and computer engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences from UC-Berkeley. His research interests lie in theoretical computer science and its interface with economics and probability. Daskalakis has been honored with the 2007 Microsoft Graduate Research Fellowship, the 2008 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, the Game Theory and Computer Science Prize from the Game Theory Society, the 2010 Sloan Fellowship in Computer Science, the 2011 SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize, the 2011 Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the 2012 Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship. He is also a recipient of Best Paper awards at the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation in 2006 and in 2013.
