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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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ARC/ACO Alumni Colloquium
Nikhil Devanur (Amazon)
Monday, September 30, 2019
Klaus 1116 East- 11:00 am
Title: Lagrangian Duality in Mechanism Design
Abstract: This talk surveys the usage of Lagrangian Duality in the design and analysis of auctions. Designing optimal (revenue maximizing) auctions in multi-parameter settings has been among the most active areas in algorithmic mechanism design in the last few years. We have discovered that Lagrangian duality is a very useful and versatile tool for this purpose. It has been used to do all of the following.
1. Derive that the optimal auction is a virtual welfare maximizer.
2. Obtain a fast algorithm for approximating the optimal auction.
3. Show how simple auctions are approximately optimal.
4. Characterize optimal auctions for structured environments.
5. Get bounds on the menu-size complexity of optimal auctions.
I will survey these applications and dive deeper into a subset of these.
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Videos of recent talks are available at: https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/46836
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