Liad Blumrosen
Microsoft
December 19, 2007
Abstract:
evenue from electronic commerce and Internet-based advertising
has been growing exponentially in the last decade, hand in hand with the
birth of large-scale marketplaces (e.g., eBay and Amazon), information
providers ( e.g., Google and Yahoo) and web-based social networks (e.g.,
MySpace and Facebook). Participants in such systems have access to
information that is known only to them (like how much buyers are willing
to pay for commodities), and economic mechanisms are designed to gather
sufficient information for computing the desired outcomes. Complex
communication protocols are often required in order to achieve good
results, whereas practical and behavioral reasons encourage the use of
simple communication exchanges.
This talk will survey several results characterizing tradeoffs between
the simplicity of markets and their achievable economic properties. On
the positive side, nearly optimal markets exist even when the agents
have restricted expressive power. On the negative side, we show that the
communication overhead of computing equilibrium-supporting prices may be
significant. Finally, we show that simple pricing schemes cannot support
close-to-optimal results in ascending-price multi-unit auctions.
Based on joint works with Moshe Babaioff, Michal Feldman, Moni Naor,
Noam Nisan, Michael Schapira and Ilya Segal.