Seminar

"A Friendly Introduction to the Shapley Value and the Combinatorics of Parking" - Carlos Martinez

Abstract: In the first part of this talk I will offer a friendly introduction to cooperative games and the Shapley value. In the second part of this talk I will tell you about my favorite combinatorial objects: parking functions. I will introduce “parking games” as a class of cooperative games derived from parking functions. Then, I will present a polynomial-time algorithm to compute the Shapley value of these games. The parking part of this talk is based on work with Jennifer Elder, Pamela Harris, and Jan Kretschmann. 

"Nonbossy Mechanisms and Voting Rules" - Hanrui Zhang

Abstract: In this talk, we will investigate social choice with monetary transfer (or in other words, mechanism design) in a model with quantitative utility functions.  We will focus on nonbossy mechanisms / voting rules: where no agent can change the outcomes that other agents receive, or the amounts that other agents pay, without changing their own outcome or payment (examples will be discussed).  In particular, we will characterize truthful & nonbossy voting rules: despite the ostensibly infinite power of payments (cf. the VCG mechanism), we show that such voting rules are still subject to a Gibbard-Satterthwaite-style characterization, which means they are essentially dictatorship.  If time permits, we will investigate some other domains corresponding to auction settings, and see what one can do with nonbossy mechanisms.  Finally, we will see some (hopefully interesting) open questions.