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Auction Theory for Crowds

Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery

Auction theory governs the costly contributions of participants in crowd systems. For example, crowdsourcing contests and badge design have been modeled as all-pay auctions where payment equals effort and only some of the participants receive rewards. This talk will surveys recent results in the design of all-pay auctions for complex environments focusing on two recent results. The first result is on a data-driven approach for counterfactual estimation. It gives a method for estimating the performance of an all-pay auction from the equilibrium bids in another all-pay auction. The second result gives a design for nearly-optimal all-pay auctions in complex environments, such as the weighted set packing (a.k.a., single-minded combinatorial auction) environment.

Mathematics; Game theory, economics, social and behavioral sciences; Computer science; Applied computer science

video/mp4

Author affiliation: Northwestern University

2017-03-01

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/60749

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/