Advanced Algorithms : Topics in Game Theory

Instructors

• S. Muthu Muthukrishnan
• MohammadTaghi HajiAghayi
• Aaron Jaggard

General Course Information

Announcements

Course Description

Lecture Schedule

Lecture/Date	Instructor	Topics	Scribe	Notes*
1. Feb 2	MohammadTaghi	Game theory, basic concepts, different kinds of equilibrium.	Rajat Shuvro
2. Feb 9	MohammadTaghi	Price of anarchy for selfish non-atomic routing games	Michael Wunder
3. Feb 16	MohammadTaghi	Market Clearing and Applications	Shoshana Neuburger
4. Feb 23	Aaron	Inter-domain routing: Stable paths problem and dispute wheels, Gao-Rexford conditions.	Paul Ringstad
5. March 2	Aaron	LSZ formulation of BGP as a game and extensions. hardness of oscillations in BGP.	Aleksandar Nikolov
March 9		Class cancelled due to Snow :-)
March 16		Spring Break !
6. March 23	Hamid Mahini	Pricing in Social Networks	Mudassir Shabbir
7. March 30	Alex Fabrikant Muthu	Complexity of finding Nash Equilibria Introduction to Auctions	Peter Borosan
8. April 6	MohammadTaghi	Auctions: classical stuff, single item. first price/second price andVCG auctions.	Imdadullah Khan
9. April 13	Muthu	Auctions : Revenue equivalence, truthfulness, direct revelation. Optimal auctions. Focus on Sponsored search auctions: multiple items, related values. GSP, GSP analysis, GSP with bells and whistles including min reserve prices, broad matching, budget optimization etc.
10. April 20	Aleksandar Nikolov and Reid Howard Shoshana Neuburger	AN : Topics in Network Creation Games. RH : Topics in Network Formation Games. SN : Online / Offline adwords matching.
11. April 27	Mike Wunder and Paul Ringstad Arzoo Syeda Zehra and Brian Thom	MW : Stochastic optimization in ads. PR : Stochastic optimization in ads. AS,BT : Best-Reply Mechanims.
12. May 4	Rajat Shuvro and Imdadulla Khan Peter Borosan and Mudassir Shabbir	RS / IK : Topics in Automated Mechanism Design and Online Auctions PB / MS : Secretary Problems and their applications
13. May 11	Mangesh Gupte and Fengming Wang	Price of Total Anarchy

Projects

1. Secretary problems and their applications. Claimed : Peter Borosan and Mudassir Shabbir
   • Improved Algorithms and Analysis for Secretary Problems and Generalizations.
     M Ajtai, N Megiddo, O Waarts. FOCS 1995.
     http://theory.stanford.edu/~megiddo/pdf/secrfin.pdf
   • A multiple-choice secretary algorithm with applications to online auctions.
     R. Kleinberg. SODA 2005.
     http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~awm/cs289/MultSec.pdf
   • Matroids, secretary problems, and online mechanisms
     M Babaioff, N Immorlica, R Kleinberg. SODA 2007.
     http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~moshe/matsec.pdf
   • Secretary problems: Weights and discounts
     M Babaioff, M Dinitz, A Gupta, N Immorlica, K Talwar. SODA 2009.
     http://zeno.siam.org/proceedings/soda/2009/SODA09_135_babaioffm.pdf
   
   
2. Online / Offline adwords matching. Claimed : Shoshana Neuburger.
   • AdWords and generalized online matching.
     Aranyak Mehta, Amin Saberi, Umesh V. Vazirani, Vijay V. Vazirani. JACM 2007.
     http://www.stanford.edu/~saberi/adwords.pdf
   • Online budgeted matching in random input models with applications to Adwords.
     Gagan Goel, Aranyak Mehta. SODA 2008.
     http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~aranyak/docs/gm08-adwords.pdf
   • Allocating Online Advertising Space with Unreliable Estimates.
     Mohammad Mahdian, Hamid Nazerzadeh, Amin Saberi. EC 2007.
     www.stanford.edu/~saberi/hamid-adwords.pdf
   • Improved Approximation Algorithms for Budgeted Allocations.
     Y Azar, B Birnbaum, AR Karlin, C Mathieu. ICALP 2008.
     http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/birnbaum/budgetedallocation.pdf
   
   
3. Stochastic optimization in ads. Claimed : Mike Wunder and Paul Ringstad
   • Stochastic Models for Budget Optimization in Search-Based Advertising
     Muthukrishnan, Pal and Svitkina. WINE 2007.
     www2007.org/workshops/paper_80.pdf
   • The Ratio Index for Budgeted Learning with Applications
     A Goel, S Khanna, B Null. SODA 2009.
     http://www.stanford.edu/%7Eashishg/papers/budgeted_ratio.pdf
   • Approximation algorithms for budgeted learning problems
     Sudipto Guha, Kamesh Munagala. STOC 2007.
     http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1250807&dl=&coll=
   • Topics in Stochastic Optimization
     Ashish Goel
     http://www.stanford.edu/~ashishg/msande325_09/
   • Algorithmic Decision Theory and Bayesian Optimization
     Sudipto Guha
     http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~sudipto/cis677_09.html
   
   
4. Topics in Network Creation / Formation Games. Claimed : Reid Howard and Aleksandar Nikolov
   1. Network Creation Games
      • On a network creation game.
        Alex Fabrikant, Ankur Luthra, Elitza N. Maneva, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Scott Shenker, PODC 2003.
        http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~alexf/papers/flmps03.pdf
      • The price of anarchy in network creation games.
        Erik D. Demaine, MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi, Hamid Mahini, Morteza Zadimoghaddam, PODC, 2007
        http://zadimoghaddam.googlepages.com/PoDC.pdf
   2. Network Formation Games
      • The Price of Stability for Network Design with Fair Cost Allocation.
        Elliot Anshelevich, Anirban Dasgupta, Jon M. Kleinberg, Iva Tardos, Tom Wexler, Tim Roughgarden, FOCS, 2004
        http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/focs04-game.pdf
   3. Online Multicast
      • Online multicast with egalitarian cost sharing.
        Moses Charikar, Howard J. Karloff, Claire Mathieu, Joseph Naor, Michael E. Saks, SPAA, 2008
        http://www.cs.brown.edu/~claire/Publis/spaa08.pdf
      • Non-cooperative multicast and facility location games.
        Chandra Chekuri, Julia Chuzhoy, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Joseph Naor, Ariel Orda, EC, 2006.
        http://ttic.uchicago.edu/~cjulia/papers/ec.pdf
   
   
5. Topics in Automated Mechanism Design and Online Auctions. Claimed : Rajat Shuvro and Imdadulla Khan
   • Automated mechanism design: A new application area for search algorithms.
     Thomas Sandholm, International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, 2003.
     www.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/amd_overview.cp03.pdf
   • Automated online mechanism design and Prophet inequalities.
     M.T. Hajiaghayi, R.D. Kleinberg, T. Sandholm, AAAI, 2007.
     http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/www/prophet.aaai07.pdf
   
   
6. Differential Privacy via Mechanism Design.
   • Differential Privacy via Mechanism Design
     Frank McSherry, Kunal Talwar. FOCS 2007.
     http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/65075/mdviadp.pdf
   • Differential Privacy.
     Cynthia Dwork.
     research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/databaseprivacy/dwork.pdf
   
   
7. Oscillations in BGP
   • The complexity of game dynamics: BGP oscillations, sink equlibria, and beyond
     Alex Fabrikant and Christos Papadimitriou. SODA 2008.
     http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~alexf/papers/fp08.pdf
   
   
8. Connections between Privacy and Economics
   • On the value of private information
     J. Kleinberg, C. H. Papadimitriou, P. Raghavan. TARK 2001.
     http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/tark.ps
   
   
9. Best-Reply Mechanims : Claimed : Arzoo Syeda Zehra
   • Best-Reply Mechanisms
     Nisan, Schapira, Zohar. INFORMS 2007.
     http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~mikesch/best-reply-MD-short.pdf
   • Asynchronous Best Reply Dynamics
     Nisan, Schapira, Zohar. WINE 2008.
     http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~mikesch/wine2008short_submission_38.pdf
   
   

Grading

• scribe notes for 1 lecture (in tex),
• choose a paper/topic from the list we will provide, make a presentation (Like an hour or two) and do a writeup (like 10 pages). This process will be periodically monitored by the TA and the lecturers so we do high quality presentations and writeups.

Scribing Instructions

$ latex scribe.tex

LaTeX for Presentations

\documentclass{beamer}

\usepackage{beamerthemesplit}

\title{Example Presentation Created with the Beamer Package}
\author{Till Tantau}
\date{\today}

\begin{document}

\frame{\titlepage}

\section[Outline]{}
\frame{\tableofcontents}

\section{Introduction}
\subsection{Overview of the Beamer Class}
\frame
{
  \frametitle{Features of the Beamer Class}

  \begin{itemize}
  \item<1-> Normal LaTeX class.
  \item<2-> Easy overlays.
  \item<3-> No external programs needed.
  \end{itemize}
}
\end{document}

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