Abstract

In the standard form of mechanism design, a key assumption is that the designer has reliable information and technology to determine a prior distribution over types of the agents. In the meanwhile, as pointed out by the Wilson’s Principle, a mechanism should reply as little as possible on the prior type distribution. In this paper, we put forward a simple model to formalize this statement.

In our model, each agent has a true type distribution, according to which his type is drawn. In addition, the agent is able to commit to a fake type distribution and bids rationally as if his type were from the fake distribution (e.g., plays a Bayes equilibrium under the fake distributions).

We investigate the equilibria of the induced distribution-reporting games among bidders, under the context of single-item auctions. We obtain several interesting findings: 

(1) the game induced by Myerson auction under our model is strategically equivalent to the first-price auction under the standard model. Consequently, the two games are revenue-equivalent. 

(2) the second-price auction, a well known prior independent auction, yields (weakly) more revenue than several reserve-based and virtual-value-based truthful, prior-dependent auctions, under our model. Our results complement the current literature which aims to show the superiority of prior-independent mechanisms.

Time

7月19日（周四）15:40-16:40

Speaker

唐平中博士是清华大学交叉信息研究院长聘副教授（2012 – 至今），博士生导师，计算经济学研究室主任。在加入清华大学之前，他在美国卡耐基梅隆大学计算机系从事博士后科学家工作，师从Tuomas Sandholm教授，从事人工智能，博弈，拍卖，肾脏交换等研究工作。他于2010在香港科技大学计算机系获得博士学位，在林方真教授的指导下进行人工智能与经济学交叉学科的研究。他曾在斯坦福大学计算机系（2008-2009），哈佛大学计算机系（2010）微软亚洲研究院（2013）以及加州大学伯克利分校（2015）从事访问研究工作。

唐平中博士的研究兴趣是人工智能及多智能体系统，专注于互联网背景下计算机科学与经济学的交互，包括智能博弈，机制设计，市场设计和拍卖，并将其理论应用于电子商务，互联网广告等相关的领域。他在该领域著名会议及期刊发表论文五十余篇，获得IJCAI-15媒体论文奖，AAMAS-17最佳论文和最佳学生论文提名，以及IJCAI-2017杰出青年科学家（Early Career Spotlight Award）。他是微软研究院铸星计划和阿里巴巴全球创新计划的入选者，担任自然科学基金中国-以色列国际合作项目中方首席科学家。
 
唐平中博士致力于将科研成果应用于互联网企业，包括百度，阿里，滴滴，今日头条，谷歌等顶级互联网企业。提出的解决方案包括搜索广告中的个性化保留价项目，电商平台的防刷单推荐算法和拼车的“两口价”定价算法。

Venue

信息管理与工程学院  602室

上海财经大学

上海市杨浦区武东路100号