Computational Aspects of Mechanism Design

In a preference aggregation setting, a group of agents must jointly make a decision, based on the individual agents’ privately known preferences. To do so, the agents need some protocol (or mechanism) that will elicit this information from them, and make the decision. Examples of such mechanisms include voting protocols, auctions, and exchanges. In most real-world settings, preference aggregation is confronted with the following three computational issues. First, there is the complexity of executing the mechanism. Second, when standard mechanisms do not apply to or are suboptimal for the setting at hand, there is the complexity of designing the mechanism. Third, the agents face the complexity of (strategically) participating in the mechanism. My thesis statement is that by studying these computational aspects of the mechanism design process, we can significantly improve the generated mechanisms in a hierarchy of ways, leading to increased economic welfare.

[1]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  Vote elicitation: complexity and strategy-proofness , 2002, AAAI/IAAI.

[2]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  Communication complexity as a lower bound for learning in games , 2004, ICML.

[3]  Ronald M. Harstad,et al.  Computationally Manageable Combinational Auctions , 1998 .

[4]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  Towards a Characterization of Polynomial Preference Elicitation with Value Queries in Combinatorial Auctions (Extended Abstract) , 2004, COLT.

[5]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  Complexity of determining nonemptiness of the core , 2003, EC '03.

[6]  E. H. Clarke.  Multipart pricing of public goods , 1971 .

[7]  William Vickrey,et al.  Counterspeculation, Auctions, And Competitive Sealed Tenders , 1961 .

[8]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  BL-WoLF: A Framework For Loss-Bounded Learnability In Zero-Sum Games , 2003, ICML.

[9]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  Computational criticisms of the revelation principle , 2004, EC '04.

[10]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  Revenue failures and collusion in combinatorial auctions and exchanges with vcg payments , 2004, EC '04.

[11]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  AWESOME: A general multiagent learning algorithm that converges in self-play and learns a best response against stationary opponents , 2003, Machine Learning.

[12]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  Automated mechanism design: complexity results stemming from the single-agent setting , 2003, ICEC '03.

[13]  Theodore Groves,et al.  Incentives in Teams , 1973 .

[14]  M. Satterthwaite.  Strategy-proofness and Arrow's conditions: Existence and correspondence theorems for voting procedures and social welfare functions , 1975 .

[15]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  Expressive negotiation over donations to charities , 2004, EC '04.

[16]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  Self-interested automated mechanism design and implications for optimal combinatorial auctions , 2004, EC '04.

[17]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  Complexity of Mechanism Design , 2002, UAI.

[18]  Inon Zuckerman,et al.  Universal Voting Protocol Tweaks to Make Manipulation Hard , 2003, IJCAI.

[19]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  An algorithm for automatically designing deterministic mechanisms without payments , 2004, Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2004. AAMAS 2004..

[20]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  Combinatorial Auctions with Structured Item Graphs , 2004, AAAI.

[21]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  Complexity Results about Nash Equilibria , 2002, IJCAI.

[22]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  Communication complexity of common voting rules , 2005, EC '05.

[23]  Noam Nisan,et al.  Algorithmic Mechanism Design , 2001, Games Econ. Behav..

[24]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  How many candidates are needed to make elections hard to manipulate? , 2003, TARK '03.

[25]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  Computing Shapley Values, Manipulating Value Division Schemes, and Checking Core Membership in Multi-Issue Domains , 2004, AAAI.

[26]  Tuomas Sandholm,et al.  Algorithm for optimal winner determination in combinatorial auctions , 2002, Artif. Intell..

[27]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  Complexity of manipulating elections with few candidates , 2002, AAAI/IAAI.

[28]  Vincent Conitzer,et al.  Complexity of (iterated) dominance , 2005, EC '05.