Friday at 1pm in SEC 1.413 streamed via Zoom at the link: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/95184948637?pwd=bXBIc2U5MEZ0QmRUb01WQ0o0SXRCdz09
This Friday, 1pm-2pm in SEC 1.413, we will be having our final EconCS seminar of the semester, featuring Andreas Haupt from MIT. He will be speaking in-person on:
Controlling Cooperation in Strategic Environments
Abstract:
In many strategic environments, a particular level of cooperation is desired: Cooperation between countries in climate action is considered desirable, while cooperation between sellers in a market is often considered collusion, and undesirable. This set of two projects asks how to control the level of...
SEC 1.413, and streamed via Zoom at: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/95184948637?pwd=bXBIc2U5MEZ0QmRUb01WQ0o0SXRCdz09
This Friday, 1pm-2pm in SEC 1.413, Clayton Thomas (Princeton) will be speaking in-person on:
Strategyproofness-Exposing Mechanism Descriptions
Abstract: A menu description defines a mechanism to player i in two steps. Step (1) uses the reports of other players to describe i’s menu: the set of i’s potential outcomes. Step (2) uses i’s report to select i’s favorite outcome from her menu. Can menu descriptions better expose strategyproofness, without sacrificing simplicity? We propose a new, simple menu description of Deferred Acceptance, the most...
SEC 1.413, & streamed via Zoom at: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/95184948637?pwd=bXBIc2U5MEZ0QmRUb01WQ0o0SXRCdz09
Shiri Ron (Weizmann Institute) will be speaking in-person:
On the Hardness of Dominant Strategy Mechanism Design
Abstract:
We study the communication complexity of dominant strategy implementations of combinatorial auctions. We start with two domains that are generally considered “easy”: multi-unit auctions with decreasing marginal values and combinatorial auctions with gross substitutes valuations. For both domains we have fast algorithms that find the welfare-maximizing allocation with communication complexity that is poly-logarithmic in the...
The Smoothed and Semi-Random Possibilities of Social Choice
Abstract:
Social choice studies how to aggregate agents' preferences to make a collective decision. It plays a critical role in many group decision making scenarios in human society as well as in multi-agent systems. A prominent challenge in designing desirable social choice mechanisms is the wide presence of worst-case paradoxes and impossibility theorems. While there is a large body of literature on using average-case analysis to...
SEC 1.413, & streamed via Zoom at: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/95184948637?pwd=bXBIc2U5MEZ0QmRUb01WQ0o0SXRCdz09
Yaonan Jin from Columbia university giving an in-person talk. He is a 4th year PhD student in Columbia University advised by Prof Xi Chen and Prof. Rocco Servedio. Here is the talk: Title: "First Price Auction is 1-1/e^2 Efficient https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.01761...
SEC 1.413, and streamed via Zoom at: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/95184948637?pwd=bXBIc2U5MEZ0QmRUb01WQ0o0SXRCdz09
Speaker: Moon Duchin from the MGGG Redistricting Lab at Tufts. She will be speaking in-person on:
Sampling partitions, with applications to redistricting
Abstract: In the world of gerrymandering, there are many reasons to want to take a “representative sample” of the space of balanced graph partitions — that is, a sample pulled from a known distribution which is clearly relevant to the political districting problem. There are numerous Markov...
SEC 1.413, and streamed via Zoom: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/95184948637?pwd=bXBIc2U5MEZ0QmRUb01WQ0o0SXRCdz09
Abstract:
We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among agents with matroid rank valuations. We present a simple framework that efficiently computes any fairness objective that satisfies some mild assumptions. Along with maximizing a fairness objective, the framework is guaranteed to run in polynomial time, maximize utilitarian social welfare and ensure strategyproofness. Our framework can be used to achieve four different fairness objectives: (a) Prioritized Lorenz dominance, (b) Maxmin fairness, (c) Weighted...
in SEC 1.413, and streamed via Zoom here: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/95184948637?pwd=bXBIc2U5MEZ0QmRUb01WQ0o0SXRCdz09
Gerdus Benade (BU) will be speaking in-person on his paper:
Abstract:
Top-k recommendations are ubiquitous, but are they stable? We study whether, given complete information, buyers and sellers prefer to continue participating in a platform using top-k recommendations rather than pursuing off-platform transactions. When there are no constraints on the number of exposures, top-k recommendations are stable. However, stable k-recommendations may not exist when exposures are constrained, e.g...
