Research Seminar by Alexey Kushnir (Carnegie Mellon University)

On Thursday, December 17 at 4.40 pm ICEFwill hold the Research Seminar.
Speaker: Alexey Kushnir (Carnegie Mellon University)
Theme: "A Geometric Approach to Mechanism Design"

Abstract: We apply basic techniques from convex analysis to develop a simple and unified treatment of optimal mechanism design. Our approach clarities the literature on reduced form implementation and generalizes it to social choice environments. We incorporate incentive compatibility using well-known results from majorization theory and prove equivalence of Bayesian and dominant-strategy implementation. We derive the optimal mechanism for any social choice problem and any linear objective of agent values using standard micro-economic tools such as Hotelling's lemma. Finally, we extend our results to concave objectives of agent values and payments by providing a fixed-point equation characterizing the optimal mechanism.

---

Forthcoming seminars

Past seminar