C
omputer Science ColloquiumYoav
Shoham
Department of Computer Science
Stanford University
It's Not Your Father's Mechanism Designs
Mechanism design (MD) is a branch of game theory devoted to the design of protocols for self interested agents. In recent years, MD has made inroads into several areas of computer science. I will discuss some of our work in this area, which ties MD to several traditional concepts within computer science: Fairness (work on so-called "fairimposition"), fault tolerance ("fault-tolerant MD"), communication complexity ("rational computation") and even cryptography ("non-cooperative computing"). (The talk is based on papers co-authored with M. Tennenholtz, R. Porter, A. Ronen, and B. McGrew in various combinations.)