Title: Payment Rules through Discriminant-Based Classifiers
Speaker: Prof. David Parkes
Affiliation: School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University
Location: Room 217-218 Huxley Building
Time: 2:00pm
Abstract. In mechanism design it is typical to impose incentive compatibility and then derive an optimal mechanism subject to this constraint. By replacing the incentive compatibility requirement with the goal of minimizing expected ex-post regret, we are able to adapt techniques of statistical machine learning to the design of payment rules. This computational approach to mechanism design is applicable to domains with multi- dimensional types and situations where computational efficiency is a concern. Specifically, given an outcome rule and access to a type distribution, we train a support vector machine with a special discriminant function structure such that it implicitly establishes a payment rule with desirable incentive properties. We discuss applications to a multi-minded combinatorial auction with a greedy winner-determination algorithm and to an assignment problem with egalitarian outcome rule. Experimental results demonstrate both that the construction produces payment rules with low ex-post regret, and that penalizing classification errors is effective in preventing failures of ex-post individual rationality.
About the speaker. David C. Parkes is the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. He was the recipient of the NSF Career Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Thouron Scholarship, the Harvard University Roslyn Abramson Award for Teaching. Parkes received his Ph.D. degree in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, and an M.Eng. (First class) in Engineering and Computing Science from Oxford University in 1995. At Harvard, Parkes founded the Economics and Computer Science research group. His research interests include mechanism design, electronic commerce, market design, and social computing. Parkes is editor of Games and Econonic Behavior, and on the editorial boards of JAAMAS, ACM TEAC and INFORMS J. Computing. Parkes also serves as the Chair of the ACM SIG on Electronic Commerce and was the Program Chair of ACMEC’07 and AAMAS’08, and General Chair of ACMEC’10.