Prices, Auctions, and Combinatorial Prophet Inequalities

Lucier, Brendan

Title:

Prices, Auctions, and Combinatorial Prophet Inequalities

dc.contributor.author	Lucier, Brendan
dc.contributor.corporatename	Georgia Institute of Technology. Algorithms, Randomness and Complexity Center	en_US
dc.contributor.corporatename	Microsoft Research	en_US
dc.date.accessioned	2016-10-16T18:05:19Z
dc.date.available	2016-10-16T18:05:19Z
dc.date.issued	2016-10-03
dc.description	Presented on October 3, 2016 at 11:00 a.m. in the Klaus Advanced Computing Building, Room 1116E.	en_US
dc.description	Brendan Lucier is a Researcher at Microsoft Research, New England. Prior to joining Microsoft, he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. His research interests lie in the intersection of theoretical Computer Science and Economics, and include algorithmic market design, algorithmic pricing, and social processes on networks. He is especially interested in the tradeoffs between simplicity, robustness, and optimality in markets for complex goods and services.	en_US
dc.description	Runtime: 51:51 minutes	en_US
dc.description.abstract	The most common way to sell resources, from apples to business licenses to concert tickets, is to post prices. A choice of prices can be viewed as an algorithm for an online stochastic optimization problem, which makes decisions using value thresholds. This connection provides an opportunity to use the famous prophet inequality -- which describes the power of threshold rules -- to study pricing problems, and vice-versa. In this talk I'll present a general framework for deriving new prophet inequalities using economic insights from pricing, with algorithmic applications. Along the way, I'll describe an unexpected connection between posted prices and equilibria of non-truthful auctions.	en_US
dc.format.extent	51:51 minutes
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/1853/55928
dc.language.iso	en_US	en_US
dc.relation.ispartofseries	Algorithms and Randomness Center (ARC) Colloquium
dc.subject	Auctions	en_US
dc.subject	Prophet inequalities	en_US
dc.title	Prices, Auctions, and Combinatorial Prophet Inequalities	en_US
dc.type	Moving Image
dc.type.genre	Lecture
dspace.entity.type	Publication
local.contributor.corporatename	Algorithms and Randomness Center
local.contributor.corporatename	College of Computing
local.relation.ispartofseries	ARC Colloquium
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