Speaker: Amir Ronen, Stanford and UC Berkeley

Title: Designing Algorithms For Game Theoretic Environments

A fascinating phenomenon of recent years is the emergence of environments and applications with strong socio-economic aspects. The Internet, electronic commerce and economics in general, wide area networks and multi-agent systems are among the many examples.

The designer of protocols and algorithms for such environments has to take into account that participants are likely to behave according to their {\em own} self interest and not necessarily as instructed. This has led several researchers in recent years to adopt computational models which are based on game theory. These models give rise to many problems which are essentially different from traditional algorithmic problems.

In this talk I will briefly introduce this novel area of research. Then I will describe two general results from "Computationally feasible VCG mechanisms" (joint work with Noam Nisan).