Knightian Auctions
Speaker: Silvio Micali , CSAIL, MIT
Date: February 14 2012
Time: 4:15PM to 5:15PM
Location: 32-155
Host: Dana Moshkovitz, CSAIL, MIT
Contact: Be Blackburn, 3-6098, imbe@mit.edu
In an auction, a player may not exactly know his own valuation, or its
distribution. We thus study single-good auctions whose players know
their own valuations only within a multiplicative factor (e.g.,
10%). The notions of implementation in dominant and undominated
strategies are naturally extended to this setting, but their power is
vastly different. Namely,
(1) We prove that no dominant-strategy mechanism can guarantee more
social welfare than by assigning the good at random; but
(2) We prove that a much better performance can be obtained via
undominated-strategy mechanisms, and actually provide tight upper and
lower bounds for the fraction of the maximum social welfare
guaranteable by such mechanisms, whether deterministic or
probabilistic.
Joint work with Alessandro Chiesa and Zeyuan Zhu.
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