RI: Small: Expressiveness and Automated Bundling in Mechanism Design: Principles and Computational Methodologies

机制设计是设计游戏规则(例如，拍卖或选举)的科学，因此，尽管每个参与者(人或计算机)基于自身利益行事，但良好的结果仍会接踵而至。直觉上，允许个人或组织表达更丰富的偏好应该会产生更好的结果。确实已经观察到，由于表现力的提高，结果效率的提高每年节省数十亿美元，例如，在PI和其他人的组合来源拍卖中。缺少的是一种设计适当表达机制的严格方法。该项目将机制设计中的新理论结果--包括表现力的计算测量--与定制搜索算法和机器学习技术相结合。目标是创造具有不同表达水平的机械设计知识。这项工作还涉及开发一种可操作的方法，以指导在广泛类别的组合和多属性域中设计适当的表达机制。此外，这项工作将为捆绑提供新的理论和计算方法。研究对象是理性主体和具有有限理性形式的主体。虽然许多结果将是一般性的，但该工作将在不同的应用程序中得到验证，例如组合拍卖、广告市场和基于目录报价的(网络)商务。仅在美国，组合式多属性采购拍卖每年就产生数百亿美元的交易额。与广告市场、频谱拍卖、消费者对消费者拍卖和基于目录的商业相关的年交易量都在数千亿或数万亿美元。因此，改进将提供可观的经济和社会效益。

Mechanism design is the science of designing the rules of a game (e.g., auction or election) so that good outcomes ensue despite each participant (human or computational) acting based on self-interest. Intuitively, allowing individuals or organizations to express richer preferences should yield better outcomes. Billions of dollars of annual savings from outcome efficiency improvements due to increased expressiveness have indeed been observed, for example, in combinatorial sourcing auctions by the PI and others. What is missing is a rigorous methodology for designing appropriately expressive mechanisms. This project combines new theoretical results in mechanism design - including computational measures of expressiveness - with custom search algorithms and machine learning techniques. The goal is to create knowledge about mechanism design with varying levels of expressiveness. The work also involves developing an operational methodology to guide the design of appropriately expressive mechanisms across a broad class of combinatorial and multi-attribute domains. Furthermore, the work will yield new theory and computational methodologies for bundling. The objects of study are rational agents and agents with forms of bounded rationality. While many of the results will be general, the work will be validated in qualitatively different applications such as combinatorial auctions, advertising markets, and catalog-offer-based (web) commerce. In the US alone, combinatorial multi-attribute sourcing auctions give rise to tens of billions of dollars in annual trade. Annual volumes associated with advertising markets, spectrum auctions, consumer-to-consumer auctions, and catalog-based commerce are all in hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars. Improvements would thus offer substantial economic and societal benefits.