44,034 research outputs found
A Grey-Box Approach to Automated Mechanism Design
Auctions play an important role in electronic commerce, and have been used to
solve problems in distributed computing. Automated approaches to designing
effective auction mechanisms are helpful in reducing the burden of traditional
game theoretic, analytic approaches and in searching through the large space of
possible auction mechanisms. This paper presents an approach to automated
mechanism design (AMD) in the domain of double auctions. We describe a novel
parametrized space of double auctions, and then introduce an evolutionary
search method that searches this space of parameters. The approach evaluates
auction mechanisms using the framework of the TAC Market Design Game and
relates the performance of the markets in that game to their constituent parts
using reinforcement learning. Experiments show that the strongest mechanisms we
found using this approach not only win the Market Design Game against known,
strong opponents, but also exhibit desirable economic properties when they run
in isolation.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables, and 1 algorithm. Extended abstract to
appear in the proceedings of AAMAS'201
Setting Parameters by Example
We introduce a class of "inverse parametric optimization" problems, in which
one is given both a parametric optimization problem and a desired optimal
solution; the task is to determine parameter values that lead to the given
solution. We describe algorithms for solving such problems for minimum spanning
trees, shortest paths, and other "optimal subgraph" problems, and discuss
applications in multicast routing, vehicle path planning, resource allocation,
and board game programming.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures. To be presented at 40th IEEE Symp. Foundations
of Computer Science (FOCS '99
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