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...

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...

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...

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...

Speaker: Matheus V. X. Ferreira

Title: Credible Decentralized Exchange Design via Verifiable Sequencing Rules https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.15569.pdf

Abstract:...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Speaker:  Martino Banchio

Title:  Learning-Robust Mechanisms and the Coordination Bias

Abstract:
We develop a theoretical model to study strategic interactions between adaptive learning algorithms. Applying continuous-time techniques, we uncover the mechanisms responsible for recently documented experimental evidence of such algorithms learning to charge supracompetitive...