קולוקוויום בית הספר למדעי המחשב

Abstract 

The modern economy is becoming highly digital, demanding a combination of both economic and computational techniques. The abundance of data and the unique nature of digital markets highlight the special role of information in today’s economic systems. In this talk, I will discuss two domains of interest. The first is auction design in the interdependent value (IDV) setting. In IDV settings, buyers hold partial information regarding the quality of the good being sold, but their actual values also depend on information that other buyers have about the good. The second is indirect mechanism design, in which the economic system can only observe partial information regarding the buyers’ preferences, if any. In both domains, impossibilities are known for very basic settings. I will show how my research has pushed the boundary of what is possible via a computational approach. For IDV settings, I utilize techniques from approximation algorithms to obtain the first general positive results for combinatorial auctions. For indirect mechanisms, I initiate the use of reinforcement learning for the design of such mechanisms.