Related papers: Simplicity-Expressiveness Tradeoffs in Mechanism D…
We develop a tool akin to the revelation principle for dynamic mechanism-selection games in which the designer can only commit to short-term mechanisms. We identify a canonical class of mechanisms rich enough to replicate the outcomes of…
When explaining black-box machine learning models, it's often important for explanations to have certain desirable properties. Most existing methods `encourage' desirable properties in their construction of explanations. In this work, we…
This paper initiates a discussion of mechanism design when the participating agents exhibit preferences that deviate from expected utility theory (EUT). In particular, we consider mechanism design for systems where the agents are modeled as…
Since economic mechanisms are often applied to very different instances of the same problem, it is desirable to identify mechanisms that work well in a wide range of circumstances. We pursue this goal for a position auction setting and…
This paper studies mechanism design environments in which the designer does not know the distribution of agents' private information a priori and instead learns from agents' behavior induced by the mechanism itself. We formalize a notion of…
A monopolistic seller aims to sell an indivisible item to multiple potential buyers. Each buyer's valuation depends on their private type and the item's quality. The seller can observe the quality but it is unknown to buyers. This quality…
We study the problem of automated mechanism design with partial verification, where each type can (mis)report only a restricted set of types (rather than any other type), induced by the principal's limited verification power. We prove…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
Selective rationalization has become a common mechanism to ensure that predictive models reveal how they use any available features. The selection may be soft or hard, and identifies a subset of input features relevant for prediction. The…
The aggregation of conflicting preferences is a central problem in multiagent systems. The key difficulty is that the agents may report their preferences insincerely. Mechanism design is the art of designing the rules of the game so that…
The aggregation of conflicting preferences is a central problem in multiagent systems. The key difficulty is that the agents may report their preferences insincerely. Mechanism design is the art of designing the rules of the game so that…
Using theory and experiments, this paper shows that the difficulty of making tradeoffs offers a parsimonious explanation for a wide range of behavioral phenomena. We develop a model of imprecise comparisons applicable to multiattribute,…
We study the design of mechanisms -- e.g., auctions -- when the designer does not control information flows between mechanism participants. A mechanism equilibrium is leakage-proof if no player conditions their actions on leaked…
We define and investigate a property of mechanisms that we call "strategic simplicity," and that is meant to capture the idea that, in strategically simple mechanisms, strategic choices require limited strategic sophistication. We define a…
This paper considers prior-independent mechanism design, namely identifying a single mechanism that has near optimal performance on every prior distribution. We show that mechanisms with truthtelling equilibria, a.k.a., revelation…
The revelation principle has been known in the economics society for decades. In this paper, I will investigate it from an energy perspective, i.e., considering the energy consumed by agents and the designer in participating a mechanism.…
Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major…
In mechanism design theory, a designer would like to implement a social choice function which specifies her favorite outcome for each possible profile of agents' private types. The revelation principle asserts that if a social choice…
A rapidly growing literature on lying in behavioral economics and psychology shows that individuals often do not lie even when lying maximizes their utility. In this work, we attempt to incorporate these findings into the theory of…
Learning algorithms need bias to generalize and perform better than random guessing. We examine the flexibility (expressivity) of biased algorithms. An expressive algorithm can adapt to changing training data, altering its outcome based on…