Past Events

  • 2023 Feb 10

    Bailey Flanigan & He Sun

    1:00pm to 2:30pm

    Location: 

    SEC 1.413 https://goo.gl/maps/UjUiWMGZCEGh5qMr9
    Fridays 1-2pm in SEC 1.413 

    Bailey Flanigan (Carnegie Mellon)

    Distortion under public-spirited voting

    Abstract: A key promise of democratic voting is that, by accounting for all constituents’ preferences, it produces decisions that benefit the constituency overall. It is alarming, then, that all deterministic voting rules have unbounded distortion: all such rules — even under reasonable conditions — will sometimes select outcomes that yield essentially no value for constituents. In this talk — based on our paper...

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  • 2023 Feb 10

    The Method of Equal Shares for Participatory Budgeting

    1:00pm to 2:00pm

    Location: 

    SEC 1.413, & streamed via Zoom at: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/95184948637?pwd=bXBIc2U5MEZ0QmRUb01WQ0o0SXRCdz09

    February 17, 1-2pm in SEC 1.413

    Dominik Peters (LAMSADE)

    The Method of Equal Shares for Participatory Budgeting

    In Participatory Budgeting, cities allow their residents to influence the city’s budget through a vote. The standard voting method simply sorts the project proposals by their number of votes, and then greedily selects projects until the budget limit is reached. We have developed a new voting rule, the Method of Equal Shares, that leads to fairer outcomes. It does this by providing...

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  • 2022 Dec 09

    Controlling Cooperation in Strategic Environments

    1:00pm to 2:00pm

    Location: 

    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...

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  • 2022 Dec 02

    Strategyproofness-Exposing Mechanism Descriptions

    1:00pm to 2:00pm

    Location: 

    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...

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  • 2022 Nov 18

    On the Hardness of Dominant Strategy Mechanism Design

    1:00pm to 2:30pm

    Location: 

    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...

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  • 2022 Nov 11

    The Smoothed and Semi-Random Possibilities of Social Choice

    1:00pm to 2:00pm

    Location: 

    https://harvard.zoom.us/j/95184948637?pwd=bXBIc2U5MEZ0QmRUb01WQ0o0SXRCdz09

    Lirong Xia (RPI) will be speaking over Zoom on:

    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...

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  • 2022 Oct 28

    "First Price Auction is 1-1/e^2 Efficient

    1:00pm to 2:30pm

    Location: 

    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...

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