Speaker: Yang Cai Assistant Professor at McGill University
Time: 2014-12-19 14:00-2014-12-19 15:00
Venue: FIT 1-222

Abstract:

In his seminal paper, Myerson [1981] provides a revenue-optimal auction for a seller who is looking to sell a single item to multiple bidders. Extending this auction to simultaneously selling multiple heterogeneous items has been one of the central problems in Mathematical Economics. We provide such an extension that is also computationally efficient. Our solution proposes a novel framework for mechanism design by reducing mechanism design problems (where one optimizes an objective function on "rational inputs") to algorithm design problems (where one optimizes an objective function on "honest inputs"). Our reduction is generic and provides a framework for many other mechanism design problems, e.g. makespan minimization with strategic machines and fair resource allocation.

Short Bio:

Yang Cai is an assistant professor. He holds a BA in computer science from Peking University, and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. Prior to joining McGill University in Fall 2014, he spent a year in UC Berkeley as a postdoctoral researcher. Yang’s research interests lie in Algorithmic Game Theory, Online Algorithms, and Logic. His Ph.D. thesis was honored with George M. Sprowls dissertation award (honorable mention) and the SIGEcom doctoral dissertation award (runner-up).
http://cs.mcgill.ca/~cai/