Introduction to the Special Issue on EC'14

This special issue of the ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation (TEAC) contains selected papers from the 15th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC’14), which was held June 8 to 12, 2014, in Palo Alto, CA, USA. We served as program chairs for the conference and as guest editors for the special issue. Based on the conference reviews, we invited a selection of the papers accepted at the conference for this special issue. (Given that it was difficult already to find enough papers to reject for the conference, making a further selection was a challenging task!) The papers submitted to this special issue then went through TEAC’s own review process. The end result is the following set of outstanding articles in this issue: • Abraham Othman, Christos Papadimitriou, and Aviad Rubinstein: The Complexity of Fairness through Equilibrium • Avinatah Hassidim, Yishay Mansour, and Shai Vardi: Local Computation Mechanism Design • Arpita Ghosh and Robert Kleinberg: Optimal Contests for Simple Agents • Alexander Peysakhovich and Drew Fudenberg: Recency, Records, and Recaps: Learning and Nonequilibrium Behavior in a Simple Decision Problem • Paul Goldberg and Aaron Roth: Bounds for the Query Complexity of Approximate Equilibria • John Fearnley and Rahul Savani: Finding Approximate Nash Equilibria of Bimatrix Games via Payoff Queries