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SCS DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES
4:00 PM - Wean Hall 7500
3:45 PM Distinguished Donuts - Outside the Hall

Tuomas Sandholm
Associate Professor
Computer Science Department, and
Director, Agent-Mediated Electronic Marketplaces Lab
Carnegie Mellon University

Making Markets and Democracy Work:
A Story of Incentives and Computing

Collective choice settings are the heart of society. Game theory provides a basis for engineering the incentives into the interaction mechanism (e.g., rules of an election or auction) so that a desirable system-wide outcome (e.g., president, resource allocation, or task allocation) is chosen even though every agent acts based on self-interest.

However, there are a host of computer science issues not traditionally addressed in game theory that have to be addressed in order to make mechanisms work in the real world. Those computing, communication, and privacy issues are deeply intertwined with the economic incentive issues. For example, the fact that agents have limited computational capabilities to determine their own (and others') preferences ruins the incentive properties of established auction mechanisms, and gives rise to new issues. On the positive side, computational complexity can be used as a barrier to strategic behavior in settings where economic mechanism design falls short.

Novel computational approaches also enable new economic institutions. For example, market clearing technology with specialized search algorithms is enabling a form of interaction that I call expressive competition. As another example, selective incremental preference elicitation can determine the optimal outcome while requiring the agents to determine and reveal only a small portion of their preferences. Furthermore, automated mechanism design can yield better mechanisms than the best known to date.

This talk is a re-presentation of Dr. Sandholm's IJCAI '03 Computers and Thought Award Lecture.

Speaker Bio:

Tuomas Sandholm is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He received the Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in computer science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1996 and 1994. He earned an M.S. (B.S. included) with distinction in Industrial Engineering and Management Science from the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, in 1991. He has published over 160 technical papers on artificial intelligence; electronic commerce; game theory; multiagent systems; auctions and exchanges; automated negotiation and contracting; coalition formation; voting; safe exchange; normative models of bounded rationality; resource-bounded reasoning; machine learning; networks; and combinatorial optimization. He has 13 years of experience building electronic marketplaces, and several of his systems have been commercially fielded.

He is also Founder, Chairman, and Chief Technology Officer of CombineNet, Inc. He received the National Science Foundation Career Award in 1997, the inaugural ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2001, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 2003, and the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 2003.

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