Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design, vol 1, number 1 2016

The first issue of the Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design is now online here: http://www.mechanism-design.org/arch/v001-1/jMID-vol1(1)-01.pdf

Herve Moulin at The Adam Smith Business School of the University of Glasgow

The University of Glasgow highlights the work of Herve Moulin:
Economists as Social Engineers: Professor Hervé Moulin, Donald J Robertson Chair in Economics at the University of Glasgow, explains mechanism design.


Hervé Moulin graduated in 1971 from the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Universite de Paris in 1975. Before joining the University of Glasgow as a Professor (Donald J Robertson Chair) of Economics, he has taught at the Ecole Nationale de Ia Statistique et Administration Economique in Paris, University of Paris at Dauphine, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Duke University, and Rice University. His research has been supported in part by seven grants from the National Science Foundation  (USA). He has written five books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles.

Stanley Reiter 1925-2014

Ricky Vohra brings the news: Stanley Reiter (1925-2014)

He was a pioneer of mechanism design, and an academic institution builder, at Northwestern, and at Purdue before that.

Study mechanism design online with Jason Hartline

Jason Hartline writes:

Please share the following announcement:

   *** Online Self-study on Mechanism Design and Approximation  ***

   Web: http://www.eecs.northwestern.edu/hartline/courses/mdna.html

   Discussion: https://piazza.com/northwestern/fall2013/eecs499/home

   To enroll: go to course page on Piazza and enroll as a student.

Synopsis. This course is a self-study course based on the manuscript "Mechanism Design and Approximation" which is based on a graduate course that has been developed at Northwestern over the past five years. Over the fall quarter we will work through roughly one chapter per week. The week will start with students reading and discussing the material of the chapter and it will conclude with students working together to solve and write up solutions to the chapter exercises.  The textbook is in final draft and your comments and suggestions will help improve the book for future students.

Excerpt from Chapter 1: Our world is an interconnected collection of economic and computational systems. Within such a system, individuals optimize their actions to achieve their own, perhaps selfish, goals; and the system combines these actions with its basic laws to produce an outcome. Some of these systems perform well, e.g., the national residency matching program which assigns medical students to residency programs in hospitals, e.g., auctions for online advertising on Internet search engines; and some of these systems perform poorly, e.g., financial markets during the 2008 meltdown, e.g., gridlocked transportation networks. The success and failure of these systems depends on the basic laws governing the system. Financial regulation can prevent disastrous market meltdowns, congestion protocols can prevent gridlock in transportation networks, and market and auction design can lead to mechanisms for allocating and exchanging goods or services that yield higher profits or increased value to society.

This text focuses on a combined computational and economic theory for the study and design of mechanisms. A central theme will be the tradeoff between optimality and other desirable properties such as simplicity, robustness, computational tractability, and practicality. This tradeoff will be quantified by a theory of approximation which measures the loss of performance of a simple, robust, and practical approximation mechanism in comparison to the complicated and delicate optimal mechanism. The theory provided does not necessarily suggest mechanisms that should be deployed in practice, instead, it pinpoints salient features of good mechanisms that should be a starting point for the practitioner.

Mechanism design conference: Copenhagen, Sept. 6-9.

WORKSHOP: NEW TRENDS IN MECHANISM DESIGN, Sept 6-9, 2011.

"A main focus of the workshop will be contributions from computer science to the field of mechanism design."

Keynote Speakers:

• Rick Antle, Yale School of Management, Yale University
• Peter Cramton, University of Maryland
• Uriel Feige, the Weizmann Institute
• Jason Hartline, Northwestern University
• Nicole Immorlica, Northwestern University
• Hervé Moulin, Rice University
• Tim Roughgarden, Stanford University

Dan McFadden salutes Hurwicz and Laffont

Daniel McFadden, The human side of mechanism design: a tribute to Leo Hurwicz and Jean-Jacque Laffont,
Rev. Econ. Design (2009) 13:77–100

(I can't help noticing something about the mechanism of economics publishing: this paper was Received: 26 June 2007 / Accepted: 30 January 2009.)

HT: David Warsh