Spring 2007 UMASS
Amherst Operations Research / Management Science Seminar Series |
Date: Friday, April 13, 2007 Time: 11:00 AM Location: Isenberg School of Management, Room 112 |
Speaker: Professor David
Parkes John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences and Associate Professor of Computer Science Division of Engineering and Applied Science Harvard University |
Biography: David C. Parkes is the John L.
Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences and Associate
Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. He 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. He was awarded the
prestigious NSF CAREER Award in 2002, an IBM Faculty Partnership Award
in 2002 and 2003, and the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 2005. Parkes
has published extensively on topics related to electronic markets,
computational mechanism design, auction theory, and multi-agent
systems. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Artificial
Intelligence Research and the Electronic Commerce Research Journal, and
has served on the Program Committee of a number of leading conferences
in artificial intelligence, multiagent systems and electronic commerce,
including ACM-EC, AAAI, IJCAI, UAI and AAMAS. Parkes is the program
co-chair of the ACM Conference on Electronic commerce (2007) and the
Int. Conf. on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (2008). |
TITLE: Adaptive Online Allocation
Mechanisms for Single-Valued Domains |
Abstract: Mechanism design studies the
problem of designing protocols that will implement desirable outcomes
in multi-agent systems with self-interest and private information. Many
interesting domains are inherently dynamic with uncertainty about both
supply and demand; e.g., selling seats on an airplane, adverts on a
search engine, computational resources. The classic
Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism extends to dynamic environments but is
non-adaptive and much less robust than when used offline. Our interest
in this talk is in the design of adaptive, online allocation
mechanisms, that are able to leverage a probabilistic (perhaps
incorrect) model of the environment. We focus on single-valued domains
in which agents are indifferent across one of a set of equivalent
allocations. A truthful, online stochastic optimization algorithm
coupled with historical sampling and an ironing procedure is presented,
along with theoretical analysis to demonstrate that the optimal policy
is generally not truthfully implementable. Experimental analysis
illustrates the cost of truthfulness in application to selling a
computational resource. |
This series is organized by the
UMASS Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. Support for this series is
provided by the Isenberg School of Management, the Department of
Finance and Operations Management, INFORMS, and the John F. Smith
Memorial Fund. For questions, please contact the INFORMS Student Chapter Speaker Series Coordinator, Ms. Trisha Woolley, twoolley@som.umass.edu |