CS
Colloquium
T
Moshe
Tennenholtz
Technion - Israel
Electronic Commerce: From Game-Theoretic and Economic Models to Working Protocols
The design of protocols for non-cooperative computational environments (e.g. Internet Auctions) is a major challenge for electronic commerce. In order to address this challenge we should tackle several complementary tasks:
1. Re-consider economic mechanisms in view of their use in computational settings.
2. Incorporate distributed systems features into the context of game-theoretic and economic models.
3. Deal with computational aspects of mechanism design.
In this talk we present an overview of some of our work on these tasks. In particular, we will consider the effects of having many participants, risk elements, and competition among sellers in the Internet setup, on the study of auctions. In addition, we consider the effects of the communication network and the asynchronous nature of distributed systems on the implementation and analysis of various economic mechanisms. Some results about the computational treatment of economic mechanisms will be mentioned as well.