Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Vincent Conitzer (Duke University) - Tearing Down the Wall Between Mechanism Design With and Without Money

Speaker: Vincent Conitzer, Duke University

Talk Title: Tearing Down the Wall Between Mechanism Design With and Without Money

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: Many mechanism designers (algorithmic or other) draw a sharp line between mechanism design with money (auctions, exchanges, ...) and without money (social choice, matching, ...). I will discuss two papers that indicate that this line is blurrier than it seems. In the first, we study generalizations of the Vickrey auction to settings where a single agent wins, but with an arbitrary contract instead of a simple payment. In the second, we study repeated allocation of a good without payments. Here, we can create a type of artificial currency that affects future assignment of the good and that allows us to use modified versions of existing mechanisms with payments to reach provably approximately optimal solutions.

Based on:
B. Paul Harrenstein, Mathijs M. de Weerdt, and Vincent Conitzer.
Strategy-Proof Contract Auctions and the Role of Ties. To appear in Games and Economic Behavior.

Mingyu Guo, Vincent Conitzer, and Daniel Reeves. Competitive Repeated Allocation Without Payments. Short version in the Workshop on Internet and Network Economics.


Biography: Vincent Conitzer is the Sally Dalton Robinson Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Economics at Duke University. He received Ph.D. (2006) and M.S. (2003) degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and an A.B. (2001) degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University. His research focuses on computational aspects of microeconomics, in particular game theory, mechanism design, voting/social choice, and auctions. This work uses techniques from, and includes applications to, artificial intelligence and multiagent systems. Conitzer has received the Social Choice and Welfare Prize (2014), a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, an NSF CAREER award, the inaugural Victor Lesser dissertation award, an honorable mention for the ACM dissertation award, and several awards for papers and service at the AAAI and AAMAS conferences. He has also been named a Kavli Fellow, a Bass Fellow, a Sloan Fellow, and one of AI's Ten to Watch. Conitzer and Preston McAfee are the founding Editors-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation (TEAC).

Host: Milind Tambe

Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - 217

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair