CS 6840 :  Lecture Schedule (tentative for the future) and Scribe Notes
Spring 2017

 

·        Wednesday, Jan 25: introduction and overview, see notes

·        Friday, Jan 27: non-atomic congestion game (routing), see notes and Section 11 in Roughgarden

·        Monday, Jan 30: Price of anarchy bound in routing games, see notes and Section 11 in Roughgarden

·        Wednesday, Feb 1: Overprovisioning in routing, see notes and Section 12 in Roughgarden.

problem set 1 available on CMS

·        Friday, Feb 3: existence of equilibria in congestion games, potential games, and best response, see notes, Section 13 of Roughgarden and Section 18.3 of the AGT book.

·        Monday, Feb 6: price of anarchy in atomic congestion games, see notes, and/or Section 12 of Roughgarden

·        Wednesday, Feb 8: a recipe for price of anarchy bound: smoothness, see notes, and/or Section 14 of Roughgarden

·        Friday, Feb 10: robustness of PoA in smooth games, mixed Nash equilibria and coarse correlated equilibria, see notes and/or Section 13 of Roughgarden

·        Monday, Feb 13: Correlated and Coarse Correlated equilibria, and NP completeness finding the best (coarse correlated) equilibrium, see notes, and Section 13 of Roughgarden

·        Wednesday, Feb 15: Best-Case Analysis and strong Nash equilibria, see notes, and Section 15 of Roughgarden

·        Friday, Feb 17: learning in games: no-regret learning, learning outcomes and its connection to CCE, see notes and section 17 of Roughgarden

·        Monday, Feb 20: FEBRUARY BREAK

·        Wednesday, Feb 22: The multiplicative Weight Algorithm, see notes, and section 17 of Roughgarden, problem set 2 available on CMS

·        Friday, Feb 24: no-regret learning and two person 0-sum games, see notes, and section 18.3 of Roughgarden

·        Monday, Feb 27: learning in games with realistic feedback, see notes.

·        Wednesday, March 1: First Price Auction as a Bayesian game: finding Nash, see notes, or section 2.1-2.3 of the auction survey, or Section 2.3 of Roughgarden

·        Friday, March 3: First Price Auction as a Bayesian game, smoothness proof for the quality of outcomes, see notes, and section 2.4 of the auction survey.

·        Monday, March 6: All pay Auction as a game, smoothness proof for the quality of outcomes, see notes.

·        Wednesday, March 8: Revenue equivalence: Myerson's lemma, see notes, and section 3.3 of Roughgarden

·        Friday, March 10: Smoothness framework for auctions, and multi-item auctions, see notes, and sections 3.1 and 3.2 of the auction survey.

·        Monday, March 13: Bayes-Nash equilibria of multi-item auctions, and the Framework of Smooth Auctions, the price of anarchy, see notes and sections 3.3 and sections 4.2 of the auction survey.

·        Wednesday, March 15: Cornell closed due to snow

·        Friday, March 17: The smoothness framework and Bayes-Nash equilibria of second prize multi-item auctions, see notes.

·        Monday, March 20: The generalized second price auction (GSP), and Nash equilibria, and its price of anarchy, see a draft of the notes

·        Wednesday, March 22: limit of price of anarchy results correlation, and learning outcomes in auction games, see notes

·        Friday, March 24: classes of valuations: submodular, subadditive and fractionally subadditive, see notes

·        Monday, March 27: more on valuations, see draft of notes

·        Wednesday, March 29: price of anarchy and players with fractionally subadditive valuations, see notes

·        Friday, March 31: discussion of some problem set 2 questions, see notes with discussion of problem (4a’) fixed on April 8

·        April 1-9: SPRING BREAK

·        Monday, April 10: A multi-item auction with one dimensional bidding space, see notes. Topic based on the paper Simple Mechanisms for Agents with Complements.

·        Wednesday, April 12: truthful auctions/mechanism: the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism, see notes

·        Friday, April 14: empirical price of anarchy: on routing, and inferring player values in auctions. For the routing example, see notes, and the paper Lili Qiu, Yang Richard Yang, Yin Zhang, Scott Shenker: On selfish routing in internet-like environments. SIGCOMM 2003: 151-162

·        Monday, April 17: inferring player values in auctions in Bayesian environments or assuming players are no-regret learners, see notes and Econometrics for Learning Agents by Denis Nekipelov, Vasilis Syrgkanis, Eva Tardos, EC 2015.

·        Wednesday, April 19: bounding the empirical price of anarchy without inferring player values, see notes, and Robust Data-Driven Efficiency Guarantees in Auctions by Darrell Hoy, Denis Nekipelov, Vasilis Syrgkanis

·        Friday, April 21: finishing empirical price of anarchy and (1-1/e) bound for first price auction, see notes.

·        Monday, April 24: Fair sharing and bidding budgets only, see notes.

·        Wednesday, April 26: inferring distribution of values from distribution of bids, see notes.

·        Friday, April 28: Guest lecture by Robert Kleinberg on learning to select the best distribution using Gittins index. See the notes, and the slides from lecture.

·        Monday: May 1st: Guest lecture by Sid Barenjee, see notes, and Section 10.2 of the Roughgarden book.

·        Wednesday, May 3rd: estimating prices in maximizing revenue, see notes. You can read more on revenue in Section 3 of the Roughgarden book.

·        Friday, May 5th: role of prizes in maximizing social welfare in auction for a single item, see notes

·        Monday, May 8th: pricing for multiple items with connection to prices and smooth mechanisms, see notes.