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UID:www.tcs.tifr.res.in/event/180
DTSTAMP:20230914T125913Z
SUMMARY:Auctions and Approximations
DESCRIPTION:Speaker: Sayan Bhattacharya\nDuke University\nDepartment of Com
 puter Science\nN303\, North Building\n304 Research Drive\n\nAbstract: \nSu
 ppose we want to design an auction for selling items to a set of customers
 . Such an auction will take the valuations of the customers as input\, and
  specify the allocation of the items and the payments.  A crucial aspect o
 f this setting is the strategic behaviors of the customers:  Each customer
  is a self-interested agent\, and she is willing to manipulate the scheme 
 by misreporting her valuation if that results in an outcome that is more f
 avorable to her. The auction has to be robust to such manipulations. We sa
 y an auction is truthful if no customer has an incentive to misreport. The
  objective is to come up with a truthful auction that either generates lar
 ge revenue\, or  maximizes the total utility of all the participants.\n\nA
 uction Theory has a rich literature in Economics. However\, it is difficul
 t to characterize the optimal auction in many settings. This consideration
 \, coupled with the advent of internet advertising where the search engine
 s generate huge amount of revenue by auctioning online ad-slots\, has moti
 vated the Computer Science community  to revisit Auction Theory from an al
 gorithmic perspective. Here\, we want to design approximately optimal auct
 ions whose outcomes can be computed in polynomial time. I will present som
 e recent results that fall under the purview of this general research agen
 da.\n
URL:https://www.tcs.tifr.res.in/web/events/180
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20110405
LOCATION:A-212 (STCS Seminar Room)
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