Abstract
In an EC 2001 paper, Amir Ronen designed an auction he called “Lookahead” as an approximately revenue optimal auction to sell a single item to bidders with values drawn from a correlated distribution. The elegant design and proof idea were, in a sense, a decade ahead of their time — after a period of oblivion, they have in the past five years repeatedly found applications, reincarnations and variants in a host of problems in revenue maximization, some of which bear no apparent relationship to auction design for correlated bidders.
In this talk I will present the lookahead auction, followed by a survey of its afterlife to this day, which touches on several fronts of current algorithmic research in revenue optimization and related open problems.
Time
2016-08-11 10:00 ~ 11:00Speaker
Hu Fu, University of British ColumbiaRoom
Room 308,School of Information Management & Engineering, Shanghai University of Finance & Economics