Special Topics at the Intersection of Social and Information Sciences
CS101A, Section 01
Fall 2011

Tentative outline:

• September 27
  Vickrey auction, introduction to routing games, course overview & mechanics
  slides
• Sepbember 29
  Price of Anarchy, introduction to nonatomic selfish routing, potential functions
  (see AGT book, chapters 17 and 18)
• October 4
  nonatomic routing: equilibrium existence, uniqueness, and Price of Anarchy
  Euiwoong: solving for social optima in nonatomic routing games
• October 6
  PoA in nonatomic games with affine costs is 4/3; atomic selfish routing
• October 11
  guest lecture: Federico Echenique
• October 13
  Nikolai: PoA in atomic congestion games (see the original paper)
  Isaac: PLS
• October 18
  regret minimization, WMA, Hedge
  (see, e.g., R. Kleinberg's course notes)
• October 20
  reaction papers due!
  Shayan: price of total anarchy in atomic congestion games (see the original paper)
  Merlob: smooth games (see the original paper)
• October 25
  introduction to auctions & mechanism design
  Alejandro: VCG, Clarke Pivot rule
  (see AGT book, chapter 9)
• October 27
  single-parameter truthful mechanisms
  Raga: revelation principle
• November 1
  guest lecture: Shaddin Dughmi
• November 3 & 4
  NEGT Workshop at Caltech. Please register, plan to attend as much as you can, and consider presenting a poster!
• November 8
  project proposals due!
  randomized mechanisms
  Bayesian setting
• November 10
  revenue-maximizing auctions
  Wen Hao: Myerson's Theorem
• November 15
  Joe: application of MIR to combinatorial auctions
  guest lecture: Yaron Singer
• November 17
  revenue-maximizing auctions, continued
  Bulow-Klemperer
  intro to digital goods
• November 22
  competitive auctions
  Khai: RSPE is 4-competitive
• November 24
  Thanksgiving - no class
• November 29 & December 1
  project presentations - no extensions!
• December 8
  project write-up due - no extensions!