Theory Seminar: An End-to-end Argument in Mechanism Design

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.

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.