An Introduction to Mechanism Design
Michael Sindelar, UMass Amherst
Tuesday 5 May 2009, 4:00 p.m.
Room 140, Computer Science Building
Mechanism Design is a subfield of economics that addresses the problem of designing systems to aggregate preferences of multiple agents such as elections, markets, and auctions. Just as computer scientists develop algorithms with provable efficiency and correctness, economists would like to develop systems that are also mathematically sound. The field of algorithmic mechanism design considers solutions for standard computational problems such as routing, scheduling, and resource allocation in the setting of multiple independent agents.
In this talk I will present the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem, which states the nonexistence of manipulation-proof mechanisms for general social choice functions. Despite this negative result, we show that robust mechanisms can be developed in many special cases. Vickrey-Clark-Groves mechanisms can be applied to situations where agent preferences are quasilinear, which covers many simple market and auction problems.
Last modified 4 May 2009