ITR/PE+SY: Collaborative Research: Foundations of Electronic Marketplaces: Game Theory, Algorithms and Systems

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Electronic markets are emerging as a primary medium of trade in business-to-business, business-to-consumer, and consumer-to-consumer settings. In order to design viable electronic marketplaces, a host of novel interrelated game-theoretic and computational issues must be addressed. With a team of interdisciplinary researchers from multiple institutions, this project will develop a unified theory of games and computing to guide and facilitate the growth of such markets. Specific research directions of the project include the following: (1) Market designs will be generalized to incorporate combinatorial bidding, multi-attribute preferences, multi-stage mechanisms, continuous mechanisms, and multi-unit sale; (2) New algorithms for clearing, quoting, incentive-compatible pricing as well as new incentive-compatible tractable mechanisms will be designed with particular emphasis on online and incremental updating of market states; (3) Bounded rationality of the agents will be investigated under a wide spectrum of models of computations, equilibrium concepts of game theory, and trade-offs between centers and agents; and (4) Novel approaches to relaxing the classic common prior assumption will be explored in order to develop practically useful models for ecommerce. The successful completion of this project will make significant contributions to both theory and practice in the areas of electronic commerce, multi-agent systems, algorithms, computational complexity theory, and game theory.