[theory students] Theory Seminar Friday at 11 am in CS 4310: Prior independent mechanism design

[Shuchi Chawla <shuchi@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Mark your calendars: we have another exciting theory seminar this Friday. Yiding Feng, a graduate student at Northwestern, will talk about his FOCS'18 paper on prior-independent mechanism design. The details are below. (There will be cookies!)

Shuchi

Title: An End-to-End Argument in Mechanism Design

Speaker: Yiding Feng, Northwestern University

Location/time: CS 4310, Feb 8, 11 am - noon

Abstract:
We consider prior-independent mechanism design, i.e. identifying a single mechanism with near optimal performance on every prior distribution. We show that mechanisms with truthtelling equilibria do not always give optimal prior-independent mechanisms and we define the revelation gap to quantify the non-optimality of revelation mechanisms.

Speaker's bio: Yiding Feng is a third year PhD in the CS Theory group at Northwestern, working with Jason Hartline. His research focuses on algorithmic game theory.