ITR - (ECS+ASE) - (dmc+soc): Automated Mechanism Design

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This ITR project will conduct an in-depth theoretical and experimental study of a new approach to mechanism design (MD), i.e., the science of designing a mechanism (e.g., voting protocol, auction, divorce procedure, or collaborative rating system) so that a desirable outcome is reached despite the fact that agents act in their own self-interest. MD has traditionally been a manual endeavor. The new approach proposed in this research is "automated mechanism design (AMD)," where the mechanism is computationally created for the specific problem instance at hand. There are several potential advantages to this approach: 1) it can yield better mechanisms than the ones known to date; 2) it applies to problem classes beyond what has been studied manually to date; 3) it can circumvent seminal economic impossibility results; and 4) it shifts the burden of design from the human to the machine. New applications of AMD, such as voting, mediation, and expressive mechanisms for charity donations, will be studied. Second, approximately optimal AMD, when the designer does not completely know the prior distribution from which the agents types are drawn, will be studied. Third, scalable optimal algorithms for AMD, as well as an AMD software, will be developed. The results have broad impacts. More efficient allocation of social goods, services, information and tasks is possible. Ecommerce and voting applications, for example, would allow for more fair outcomes, where more savvy or better-informed parties can no longer exploit less knowledgeable parties to the interaction. Security can also be enhanced as no party will be motivated or able to manipulate the system to his or her advantage.