Overview
Over the past decade, research in theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence,
operations research, and economics has joined forces to tackle problems involving incentives
and computation. These problems are of particular importance in application areas like the Web
and the Internet that involve large and diverse populations.
The Conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE) is an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange
of ideas and results on incentives and computation arising from these various fields.
WINE 2022 will take place on December 12 - 15, 2022, in Troy, NY, USA, hosted by Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute (RPI).
Sponsors
Important Dates
Paper submission deadline:
July 7, 2022, 11:59pm Pacific Time
Author notification:
Before September 7, 2022
Contact
wine2022chairs@gmail.com
Call for Papers: Eighteenth Conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE 2022)
Troy, NY, USA, December 12 - 15, 2022
Webpage: https://www.cs.rpi.edu/wine2022/
Over the past two decades, researchers in theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, operations
research, and economics
have joined forces to understand the interplay of incentives and computation.
These issues are of particular importance in the Web and the Internet that enable the interaction of large and
diverse populations.
The Conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE) is an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of ideas
and results on incentives
and computation arising from these various fields.
WINE 2022 continues the successful tradition of the Conference on Web and Internet Economics
(named Workshop on Internet & Network Economics until 2013), which was held annually from 2005 to present.
The program will feature invited talks, tutorials, paper presentations, a poster session, and a plenary
session on spotlight beyond WINE.
All paper submissions will be peer-reviewed and evaluated on the basis of the quality of their contribution,
originality, soundness, and significance.
Submissions are invited in, but not limited to, the following topics:
- Algorithmic Game Theory
- Algorithmic Mechanism Design
- Market Design
- Auction Algorithms and Analysis
- Computational Advertising
- Computational Aspects of Equilibria
- Computational Social Choice
- Learning in Markets and Mechanism Design
- Learning under Strategic Behavior
- Coalitions, Coordination, and Collective Action
- Economic Aspects of Security and Privacy
- Economic Aspects of Distributed Computing and Cryptocurrencies
- Econometrics, ML, and Data Science
- Behavioral Economics and Behavioral Modeling
- Fairness and Trust in Games and Markets
- Price Differentiation and Price Dynamics
- Revenue Management
- Social Networks and Network Games
Authors of the accepted papers will have a choice to attend the conference virtually.
Important Dates
Paper submission deadline: July 7, 2022, 11:59pm Pacific Time
Author notification: before September 7, 2022
Submission Server
Easychair submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wine2022
Submission Format
Authors are invited to submit extended abstracts presenting original research on any of the research fields
related to WINE 2022.
An extended abstract submitted to WINE 2022 should start with the title of the paper, each author’s name,
affiliation and e-mail address,
followed by a one-paragraph summary of the results to be presented.
This should then be followed by a technical exposition of the main ideas and techniques used to achieve these
results,
including motivation and a clear comparison with related work.
The extended abstract should not exceed 18 single-spaced pages (including references) using reasonable
margins
(at least one-inch margins all around) and at least 11-point font.
If the authors believe that more details are essential to substantiate the claims of the paper,
they may include a clearly marked appendix (with no space limit) that will be read at the discretion of the
Program Committee.
It is strongly recommended that submissions adhere to the specified format and length.
Submissions that are clearly too long may be rejected immediately.
The above specifications are meant to provide more freedom to the authors at the time of submission.
Note that accepted papers will be allocated 18 pages (including references) in the LNCS format in the
proceedings (see below).
The proceedings of the conference will be published by Springer-Verlag in the
ARCoSS/LNCS series, and will be available for distribution at the conference.
Accepted papers will be allocated 18 pages total in the LNCS format in the
proceedings. Submissions are encouraged, though not required, to follow the
LNCS format (Latex, Word). More information about the LNCS format can be
found on the author instructions page of Springer-Verlag.
Questions regarding the submissions can be directed to the PC chairs via wine2022chairs@gmail.com.
Conflict of Interest Policy
A conflict of interest (COI) is limited to the following categories:
- Family member or close friend.
- Ph.D. advisor or advisee (no time limit), or postdoctoral or undergraduate mentor or mentee within the
past five years.
- Person with the same affiliation (department, not institute).
- Involved in an alleged incident of harassment (it is not required that the incident be reported).
- Reviewer owes author a favor (e.g., recently requested a reference letter).
- Frequent or recent collaborator whom you believe cannot objectively review your work.
Declaring COIs prevents the specified person from reviewing a paper, thereby constraining the matching process
and so
potentially negatively impacting review quality.
For this reason, COIs should not be declared automatically based on a prior relationship
(e.g., coauthor, friend, colleague in a different department at the same institution, etc.).
Authors can contact the PC chairs directly if they have a conflict with an individual who is likely to be
asked
to serve as a subreviewer for the paper.
Even though EasyChair asks the authors to specify the type of conflict of interest when they declare one, the
authors do *not* need to answer that question. They may avoid answering it by choosing the option “Others”.
Best Paper Award
The program committee will decide upon a best paper award and a best student paper award.
Important Notice
To accommodate the publishing traditions of different fields, authors of accepted papers can ask that only
a
one-page abstract of the paper appear in the proceedings, along with a URL pointing to the full paper.
The authors should guarantee the link to be reliable for at least two years. This option is available to
accommodate subsequent publication in journals that would not consider results that have been published in
preliminary
form
in conference proceedings. Such papers must be submitted and formatted just like papers submitted for
full-text
publication.
Simultaneous submission of results to another conference with published proceedings is not allowed. Results
previously published or presented at another archival conference prior to WINE 2022, or published (or accepted
for publication) at a journal prior to the submission deadline of WINE 2022, will not be considered.
Simultaneous submission of results to a journal is allowed only if the authors intend to publish the paper as
a one-page abstract in WINE 2022. Papers that are accepted and appear as a one-page abstract can be
subsequently
submitted for publication in a journal but may not be submitted to any other conference that has a published
proceeding.
Forward to Journal
Upon submission, WINE authors would have a chance to select at most one
from the following journals:
How does it work? If a WINE paper is accepted and the authors plan to use
the forward-to-journal option, the authors must submit a one-page extended
abstract by the deadline for the camera-ready version of the conference
proceeding.
The authors then have the option of submitting their journal paper by January
20, 2023, to the journal they have selected. The cover letter to the journal
should specify that the submission is part of the WINE '22 forward-to-journal
process. WINE papers that submit a final version by this deadline will be
forwarded to the journal of choice along with the de-anonymized conference
reviews. Note that a journal's participation in the WINE forward-to-journal
option does not mean that other forms of previous publication are acceptable.
What are the implications? The journal's department editor and/or associate
editor can use the conference reviews to guide the decision-making process
in whatever way the journal finds appropriate. We suspect the AEs might
choose referees from among the set of conference reviewers, especially if
they found the conference reviews informative. We would like to emphasize,
however, that the conference reviewers are not required to accept such
review requests. Furthermore, journals are not required to accept these
papers (and may even choose to desk-reject them depending on fit).
Call for Nominations
The 18th conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE'22) will host a 'Spotlight beyond WINE' session to
highlight some of the best works in algorithmic game theory that appeared in conferences and journals other
than WINE, or mature working papers.
The intention of this session is to expose WINE attendees to exciting works beyond the boundary of their
current awareness.
We seek nominations for papers on topics that are relevant to Web and Internet Economics and have made
breakthrough advances, provided new directions, or had significant impact on practice.
Examples of relevant conferences and journals include:
EC/STOC/FOCS/SODA/ITCS, AAAI/IJCAI/AAMAS, NeurIPS/ICML/COLT, WWW/KDD,
AER/Econometrica/JPE/QJE/RESTUD/TE/AEJ/JET/GEB, and Math of OR/Management Science/Operations Research.
Nomination
Anyone can nominate, and self-nomination is allowed. We particularly encourage members of PCs or editorial
boards in various venues to submit nominations.
Deadline: Sep 16, 2022
Nomination format: Nominations should be emailed to spotlightbeyondwine2022@gmail.com, and should include:
- Paper title and author names.
- Publication venue or online working version. Preference will be given to papers that have appeared in a
related conference or journal within the past two years, or have a working version circulated within the
past two years.
- A few sentences explaining why the paper is a good fit for spotlight beyond WINE.
- Names of 1-3 experts in the area of the paper.
Committee members
- Edith Elkind (U. of Oxford)
- Michal Feldman (Tel Aviv U.)
- Philipp Strack (Yale U.)
- Gabriel Weintraub (Stanford U.)
Call for Posters
WINE 2022 will feature an online poster session. The poster session is envisioned to be a great way to attract
attention to recent work and start a discussion.
Submission Information
Please complete the form at https://forms.gle/Phc5EZ9K9ugo52zX9 before November 1, 2022, 11:59 PM AOE (you will need
a Google ID to register).
To submit a paper for the poster session, you will need to provide the following information:
-
Title and abstract for the poster
-
Name and email address of the presenter, and names of coauthors
-
Either a link to the full paper, or the full paper itself
-
Details if the paper has appeared at a conference or in a journal
For accepted posters, the presenter must also register for WINE 2022 and agree to be present during the online
poster session (early registration deadline Nov. 12). The date and time for the poster session will be decided
later.
Important Dates
Please fill up the submission form before November 1, 2022, 11:59 PM AOE. Acceptance notifications will
be sent by November 7, 2022.
Posters are non-archival, and will not appear as part of WINE 2022 proceedings.
Questions? Send an email to wine2022posters@gmail.com
Accepted Papers
Jad Salem, Swati Gupta and Vijay Kamble.
Algorithmic Challenges in Ensuring Fairness at the Time of Decision
Kamesh Munagala, Yiheng Shen and Kangning Wang.
Auditing for Core Stability in Participatory Budgeting
Pinyan Lu, Enze Sun and Chenghan Zhou.
Better Approximation for Interdependent SOS Valuations
Lirong Xia and Weiqiang Zheng.
Beyond the Worst Case: Semi-Random Complexity Analysis of Winner Determination
Tim Oosterwijk, Daniel Schmand and Marc Schroder.
Bicriteria Nash Flows over Time
Xiaotie Deng, Ningyuan Li, Weian Li and Qi Qi.
Competition Among Parallel Contests
Will Ma and David Simchi-Levi.
Constructing Demand Curves from a Single Observation of Bundle Sales
Grzegorz Pierczyński and Piotr Skowron.
Core-Stable Committees under Restricted Domains
Peng Shi and Junxiong Yin.
Eliminating Waste in Cadaveric Organ Allocation
Christine Konicki, Mithun Chakraborty and Michael Wellman.
Exploiting Extensive-Form Structure in Empirical Game-Theoretic Analysis
Pan Xu.
Exploring the Tradeoff between Competitive Ratio and Variance in Online-Matching Markets
Xiaohui Bei, Zihao Li and Junjie Luo.
Fair and Efficient Multi-Resource Allocation for Cloud Computing
Yumou Fei.
Improved Approximation to First-Best Gains-from-Trade
Bainian Hao and Carla Michini.
Inefficiency of pure Nash equilibria in series-parallel network congestion games
Yi-Chun Chen, Gaoji Hu and Xiangqian Yang.
Information Design in Allocation with Costly Verification
Mengqian Zhang, Yuhao Li, Jichen Li, Chaozhe Kong and Xiaotie Deng.
Insightful Mining Equilibria
Zhibin Tan, Zhigang Cao and Zhengxing Zou.
Matrix-exact Covers of Minimum-Cost-Spanning-Tree Games
Siddharth Barman, Anand Krishna, Yadati Narahari and Soumyarup Sadhukhan.
Nash Welfare Guarantees for Fair and Efficient Coverage
Moshe Babaioff, Tomer Ezra and Uriel Feige.
On Best-of-Both-Worlds Fair-Share Allocations
Susanne Albers and Sebastian Schubert.
Online Ad Allocation in Bounded-Degree Graphs
Melika Abolhassani, Hossein Esfandiari, Yasamin Nazari, Balasubramanian Sivan, Yifeng Teng and Creighton
Thomas.
Online Allocation and Display Ads Optimization with Surplus Supply
Matthew Eichhorn, Siddhartha Banerjee and David Kempe.
Online Team Formation under Different Synergies
Titing Cui and Michael Hamilton.
Optimal Feature-Based Market Segmentation and Pricing
Javier Cembrano, Felix Fischer and Max Klimm.
Optimal Impartial Correspondences
Yurong Chen, Xiaotie Deng and Yuhao Li.
Optimal Private Payoff Manipulation against Commitment in Extensive-form Games
Nick Gravin, Hao Li and Zhihao Gavin Tang.
Optimal Prophet Inequality with Less than One Sample
Boris Epstein and Will Ma.
Order Selection Problems in Hiring Pipelines
Tong Xie and Zizhuo Wang.
Personalized Assortment Optimization under Consumer Choice Models with Local Network Effects
Sumit Goel and Wade Hann-Caruthers.
Project selection with partially verifiable information
Bo Jiang, Zizhuo Wang and Nanxi Zhang.
Revenue Management Under a Price Alert Mechanism
Adam Elmachtoub, Vineet Goyal, Roger Lederman and Harsh Sheth.
Revenue Management with Product Retirement and Customer Selection
Cuimin Ba.
Robust Model Misspecification and Paradigm Shifts
Hu Fu, Qun Hu and Jia'Nan Lin.
Stability of Queueing Networks Beyond Complete Bipartite Cases
Haris Aziz, Alexander Lam, Barton Lee and Toby Walsh.
Strategyproof and Proportionally Fair Facility Location
Itai Feigenbaum.
Strategyproofness in Kidney Exchange with Cancellations
Atanas Dinev and Matthew Weinberg.
Tight Bounds on 3-Team Manipulations in Randomized Death Match
Jugal Garg, Edin Husić, Aniket Murhekar and László Végh.
Tractable Fragments of the Maximum Nash Welfare Problem
Yuan Qiu, Jinyan Liu and Di Wang.
Truthful Generalized Linear Models
Accepted Posters
Poster Session 8am-9am ET on Virtual Chair
Vignesh Viswanathan and Yair Zick
A General Framework for Fair Allocation with Matroid Rank Valuations
We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among agents with matroid rank
valuations. We present a simple framework that efficiently computes any fairness objective that satisfies
some mild assumptions. Along with maximizing a fairness objective, the framework is guaranteed to run in
polynomial time, maximize utilitarian social welfare and ensure strategyproofness. We show how our
framework can be used to achieve four different fairness objectives: (a) Prioritized Lorenz dominance, (b)
Maxmin fairness, (c) Weighted leximin, and (d) Max weighted Nash welfare. In particular, our framework
provides the first polynomial time algorithms to compute weighted leximin and max weighted Nash welfare
allocations for matroid rank valuations.
Link:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.07311
Peng Shi
Optimal Matchmaking Strategy in Two-Sided Marketplaces
Online platforms that match customers with suitable service providers utilize a wide variety of
matchmaking strategies; some create a searchable directory of one side of the market (i.e., Airbnb, Google
Local Finder), some allow both sides of the market to search and initiate contact (i.e., Care.com,
Upwork), and others implement centralized matching (i.e., Amazon Home Services, TaskRabbit). This paper
compares these strategies in terms of their efficiency of matchmaking as proxied by the amount of
communication needed to facilitate a good market outcome. The paper finds that the relative performance of
these matchmaking strategies is driven by whether the preferences of agents on each side of the market are
easy to describe. Here, “easy to describe” means that the preferences can be inferred with sufficient
accuracy based on responses to standardized questionnaires. For markets with suitable characteristics,
each of these matchmaking strategies can provide near-optimal performance guarantees according to an
analysis based on information theory. The analysis provides prescriptive insights for online platforms.
Link:
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4444
Emily Ryu, Jon Kleinberg, Éva Tardos
Ordered Submodularity and its Applications to Diversifying Recommendations
A fundamental task underlying many important optimization problems, from influence maximization to sensor
placement to content recommendation, is to select the optimal group of $k$ items from a larger set.
Submodularity has been very effective in allowing approximation algorithms for such subset selection
problems. However, in several applications, we are interested not only in the elements of a set, but also
the \emph{order} in which they appear, breaking the assumption that all selected items receive equal
consideration. One such category of applications involves the presentation of search results, product
recommendations, news articles, and other content, due to the well-documented phenomenon that humans pay
greater attention to higher-ranked items. As a result, optimization in content presentation for diversity,
user coverage, calibration, or other objectives more accurately represents a sequence selection problem,
to which traditional submodularity approximation results no longer apply. Although extensions of
submodularity to sequences have been proposed, none is designed to model settings where items contribute
based on their position in a ranked list, and hence they are not able to express these types of
optimization problems. In this paper, we aim to address this modeling gap. Here, we propose a new
formalism of \emph{ordered submodularity} that captures these ordering problems in content presentation,
and more generally a category of optimization problems over ranked sequences in which different list
positions contribute differently to the objective function. We analyze the natural ordered analogue of the
greedy algorithm and show that it provides a $2$-approximation. We also show that this bound is tight,
establishing that our new framework is conceptually and quantitatively distinct from previous formalisms
of set and sequence submodularity.
Link:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.00233.pdf
Jerry Anunrojwong, Santiago R. Balseiro, Omar Besbes
On the Robustness of Second-Price Auctions in Prior-Independent Mechanism Design
Classical Bayesian mechanism design relies on the common prior assumption, but such prior is often not
available in practice. We study the design of prior-independent mechanisms that relax this assumption: the
seller is selling an indivisible item to n buyers such that the buyers' valuations are drawn from a joint
distribution that is unknown to both the buyers and the seller; buyers do not need to form beliefs about
competitors, and the seller assumes the distribution is adversarially chosen from a specified class. We
measure performance through the worst-case regret, or the difference between the expected revenue
achievable with perfect knowledge of buyers' valuations and the actual mechanism revenue. We study a broad
set of classes of valuation distributions that capture a wide spectrum of possible dependencies:
independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) distributions, mixtures of i.i.d. distributions,
affiliated and exchangeable distributions, exchangeable distributions, and all joint distributions. We
derive in quasi closed form the minimax values and the associated optimal mechanism. In particular, we
show that the first three classes admit the same minimax regret value, which is decreasing with the number
of competitors, while the last two have the same minimax regret equal to that of the single buyer case.
Furthermore, we show that the minimax optimal mechanisms have a simple form across all settings: a
second-price auction with random reserve prices, which shows its robustness in prior-independent mechanism
design. En route to our results, we also develop a principled methodology to determine the form of the
optimal mechanism and worst-case distribution via first-order conditions that should be of independent
interest in other minimax problems.
Link:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10478
Farhad Mohsin, Ao Liu, Pin-Yu Chen, Francesca Rossi, Lirong Xia
Learning to Design Fair and Private Voting Rules
Voting is used widely to identify a collective decision for a group of agents, based on their preferences.
In this paper, we focus on evaluating and designing voting rules that support both the privacy of the
voting agents and a notion of fairness over such agents. To do this, we introduce a novel notion of group
fairness and adopt the existing notion of local differential privacy. We then evaluate the level of group
fairness in several existing voting rules, as well as the trade-offs between fairness and privacy, showing
that it is not possible to always obtain maximal economic efficiency with high fairness or high privacy
levels. Then, we present both a machine learning and a constrained optimization approach to design new
voting rules that are fair while maintaining a high level of economic efficiency. Finally, we empirically
examine the effect of adding noise to create local differentially private voting rules and discuss the
three-way trade-off between economic efficiency, fairness, and privacy.
Hadi Hosseini, Zhiyi Huang, Ayumi Igarashi, and Nisarg Shah
Class Fairness in Online Matching
We initiate the study of fairness among \textit{classes} of agents in online bipartite matching where
there is a given set of offline vertices (aka agents) and another set of vertices (aka items) that arrive
online and must be matched irrevocably upon arrival. In this setting, agents are partitioned into a set of
classes and the matching is required to be fair with respect to the classes. We adopt popular fairness
notions (e.g. envy-freeness, proportionality, and maximin share) and their relaxations to this setting and
study deterministic and randomized algorithms for matching indivisible items (leading to integral
matchings) and for matching divisible items (leading to fractional matchings). For matching indivisible
items, we propose an adaptive-priority-based algorithm, MATCH-AND-SHIFT, prove that it achieves
$\half$-approximation of both class envy-freeness up to one item and class maximin share fairness, and
show that each guarantee is tight. For matching divisible items, we design a water-filling-based
algorithm, EQUAL-FILLING, that achieves $(\e)$-approximation of class envy-freeness and class
proportionality; we prove $\e$ to be tight for class proportionality and establish a $\sfrac{3}{4}$ upper
bound on class envy-freeness.
Nicolas Pastrian
Monopolistic Screening with Buyers Who Sample
We study a monopolistic screening problem with boundedly rational buyers and a noisy communication
technology. In our model the seller designs a menu of quality-price pairs to a continuum of buyers that
remain unaware of the offered menu. Instead, buyers will have access only to a finite number of samples
from the menu offered by the seller and then decide which sampled alternative to purchase if any. This
procedure give arise to random consideration sets from the perspective of the buyers. We show that if
there is a single sample available, the seller will optimally choose to offer a single alternative, while
if two samples are available then neither offering a single alternative nor two alternatives is
necessarily optimal.
Maneesha Papireddygari, Rafael Frongillo and Bo Waggoner
An Axiomatic and Elicitation Perspective on Market Makers for Decentralized Exchanges
We introduce axioms for general asset market making, and apply them to study automated maker makers for
decentralized exchanges. Our first result is a characterization of constant-function market makers (CFMMs)
without transaction fees. We then give a general conceptual bridge between asset market making and
Arrow-Debreu prediction markets. As a special case, we derive a precise equivalence between CFMMs and
cost-function market makers from the prediction markets literature.
Jiaxin Song, Xiaolin Bu, Zihao Li, Shengxin Liu, Biaoshuai Tao
On the Complexity of Maximizing Social Welfare of Indivisible Items within Fairness Constraints
Fair division is a classical topic studied in various disciplines and captures many real applications. One
important issue in fair division is to cope with (economic) efficiency and fairness. A natural question
along this direction that receives considerable attention is: How to obtain the most efficient allocations
among all the fair allocations? In this paper, we study the complexity of maximizing social welfare within
envy-free up to one item (EF1) allocations of indivisible goods for both normalized and unnormalized
valuations. With two agents, we show a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) and complement
this positive result with the NP-hardness result where the latter resolves an open problem raised by the
previous work. Further, when the number of agents n is a constant, we provide a bi-criteria algorithm that
finds the optimal social welfare while relaxing EF1 by a factor arbitrarily close to 1. We complement this
by providing several strong inapproximability results if EF1 is not allowed to relax. In particular, we
demonstrate that the inapproximability becomes stronger as n increases. Last, we consider the case with a
general number of agents. In this case, we give a variant of the round-robin algorithm with an
approximation ratio of 1/n for unnormalized valuations and provide inapproximability results of n^{1/3−ε}
and m^{1/2−ε} for normalized valuations. In addition, we show that our results of bi-criteria optimization
for constant n cannot be extended to the setting here unless P=NP.
Qishen Han, Grant Schoenebeck, Biaoshuai Tao, Lirong Xia
Do not Worry about Equilibrium Selection in Binary Voting
We study the Condorcet Jury Theorem under a game-theoretical context. A key challenge in such a setting is
the multiplicity of equilibria. We reveal the surprising equivalence between a strategy profile being a
strong equilibrium and leading to the decision favored by the majority: every epsilon-strong equilibrium
with small epsilon formed by strategic agents will lead to a good collective decision. We quantify the
probability of error which goes to 0 as the number of agents grows. In our model, voters' preferences
between two alternatives depend on a discrete state variable that is not directly observable. Each voter
receives a private signal that is correlated with the state variable.
Zihan Tan, Yifeng Teng and Mingfei Zhao
Worst-Case Welfare of Item Pricing in the Tollbooth Problem
We study the worst-case welfare of item pricing in the tollbooth problem. The problem was first introduced
by Guruswami et al., and is a special case of the combinatorial auction in which (i) each of the $m$ items
in the auction is an edge of some underlying graph; and (ii) each of the n buyers is single-minded and
only interested in buying all edges of a single path. We consider the competitive ratio between the
hindsight optimal welfare and the optimal worst-case welfare among all item-pricing mechanisms, when the
order of the arriving buyers is adversarial. We assume that buyers own the tie-breaking power, i.e. they
can choose whether or not to buy the demand path at 0 utility. We prove a tight competitive ratio of 3/2
when the underlying graph is a single path (also known as the highway problem), whereas item-pricing can
achieve the hindsight optimal if the seller is allowed to choose a proper tie-breaking rule to maximize
the welfare. Moreover, we prove an O(1) upper bound of the competitive ratio when the underlying graph is
a tree. For general graphs, we prove an \Omega(m^{1/8}) lower bound of the competitive ratio. We show that
an m^{\Omega(1)} competitive ratio is unavoidable even if the graph is a grid, or if the capacity of every
edge is augmented by a constant factor c. The results hold even if the seller has tie-breaking power.
Yue Han, Christopher Jerrett, Elliot Anshelevich
Optimizing Multiple Simultaneous Objectives for Voting and Facility Location
We study the classic facility location setting, where we are given $n$ clients and $m$ possible facility
locations in some arbitrary metric space, and want to choose a location to build a facility. The exact
same setting also arises in spatial social choice, where voters are the clients and the goal is to choose
a candidate or outcome, with the distance from a voter to an outcome representing the cost of this outcome
for the voter (e.g., based on their ideological differences). Unlike most previous work, we do not focus
on a single objective to optimize (e.g., the total distance from clients to the facility, or the maximum
distance, etc.), but instead attempt to optimize several different objectives *simultaneously*. More
specifically, we consider the l-centrum family of objectives, which includes the total distance, max
distance, and many others. We present tight bounds on how well any pair of such objectives (e.g., max and
sum) can be simultaneously approximated compared to their optimum outcomes. In particular, we show that
for any such pair of objectives, it is always possible to choose an outcome which simultaneously
approximates both objectives within a factor of $1+\sqrt{2}$, and give a precise characterization of how
this factor improves as the two objectives being optimized become more similar. For $q>2$ different
centrum objectives, we show that it is always possible to approximate all $q$ of these objectives within a
small constant, and that this constant approaches 3 as q increases. Our results show that when optimizing
only a few simultaneous objectives, it is always possible to form an outcome which is a significantly
better than 3 approximation for all of these objectives.
Xin Chen, Zexing Xu and Yuan Zhou
Personalized Pricing with Group Fairness Constraint
In the big data era, personalized pricing becomes
a popular strategy which sets different prices for
the same product according to individual’s fea-
tures. Despite its popularity among companies,
this practice has been heatedly debated due to
the concerns over fairness that can be potentially
caused by price discrimination. In this paper,
we consider the problem of a single-product per-
sonalized pricing for different groups under fair-
ness constraints. Specifically, we define group
fairness constraints under different distance met-
rics in the personalized pricing context. We then
establish a stochastic formulation which maxi-
mizes the revenue. Under the discrete price set-
ting, we reformulate this problem as a linear pro-
gram and obtain the optimal pricing policy effi-
ciently. To bridge the gap between the discrete
and continuous price setting, theoretically, we
prove an O( 1
l ) gap between the optimal revenue
with continuous and discrete price set of size l.
Empirically, we demonstrate the benefits of im-
posing fairness constraints on both synthetic data
and real-world data. Our results also provide
managerial insights into setting a proper fairness
degree as well as an appropriate size of discrete
price set.
Hadi Hosseini, Justin Payan, Rik Sengupta, Rohit Vaish and Vignesh Viswanathan
Graphical House Allocation
The classical house allocation problem involves assigning n houses (or items) to n agents
according to their preferences. A key criterion in such problems is satisfying some fairness
constraints such as envy-freeness. We consider a generalization of this problem wherein the
agents are placed along the vertices of a graph (corresponding to a social network), and each
agent can only experience envy towards its neighbors. Our goal is to minimize the aggregate
envy among the agents as a natural fairness objective, i.e., the sum of all pairwise envy values
over all edges in a social graph.
When agents have identical and evenly-spaced valuations, our problem reduces to the well-
studied problem of linear arrangements. For identical valuations with possibly uneven spacing,
we show a number of deep and surprising ways in which our setting is a departure from
this classical problem. More broadly, we contribute several structural and computational
results for various classes of graphs, including NP-hardness results for disjoint unions of paths,
cycles, stars, or cliques, and fixed-parameter tractable (and, in some cases, polynomial-time)
algorithms for paths, cycles, stars, cliques, and their disjoint unions. Additionally, a conceptual
contribution of our work is the formulation of a structural property for disconnected graphs
that we call separability which results in efficient parameterized algorithms for finding optimal
allocations.
TBD
Tuesday, December 13
CBIS
Auditorium (west end of the building) or on Virtual Chair
|
8:30-8:55 |
Breakfast |
8:55-9:00
|
Welcome |
9:00-10:00
Session 1 Keynote
Chair: Tracy Liu
|
Marzena Rostek.
Decentralized-Market Design
|
10:00-10:30 |
Coffee break |
10:30-11:30
Session 2
Mechanism Design
Chair: Mithun Chakraborty
|
Pinyan Lu, Enze Sun and Chenghan Zhou. Better Approximation for Interdependent SOS Valuations
|
Xiaohui Bei, Zihao Li and Junjie Luo. Fair and Efficient Multi-Resource Allocation for Cloud
Computing |
Yi-Chun Chen, Gaoji Hu and Xiangqian Yang. Information Design in Allocation with Costly
Verification
|
11:20-11:40 |
Coffee break |
11:40-12:40
Session 3
Learning, Algorithm and Pricing
Chair: Adam Elmachtoub
|
Jad Salem, Swati Gupta and Vijay Kamble. Algorithmic Challenges in Ensuring Fairness at the Time
of
Decision |
Tim Oosterwijk, Daniel Schmand and Marc Schroder. Bicriteria Nash Flows over Time |
Siddharth Barman, Anand Krishna, Yadati Narahari and Soumyarup Sadhukhan. Nash Welfare Guarantees
for Fair
and Efficient Coverage |
12:40-14:10 |
Lunch at EMPAC:
the Mezzanine
area |
14:10-15:10
Session 4
Social Choice
Chair: Hadi Hosseini
|
Kamesh Munagala, Yiheng Shen and Kangning Wang. Auditing for Core Stability in Participatory
Budgeting |
Lirong Xia and Weiqiang Zheng. Beyond the Worst Case: Semi-Random Complexity Analysis of Winner
Determination |
Grzegorz Pierczyński and Piotr Skowron. Core-Stable Committees under Restricted Domains |
15:10-15:40 |
Coffee break |
15:40-16:40
Session 5
Learning, Algorithm and Pricing
Chair: Will Ma
|
Moshe Babaioff, Tomer Ezra and Uriel Feige. On Best-of-Both-Worlds Fair-Share Allocations
|
Susanne Albers and Sebastian Schubert. Online Ad Allocation in Bounded-Degree Graphs |
Melika Abolhassani, Hossein Esfandiari, Yasamin Nazari, Balasubramanian Sivan, Yifeng Teng and
Creighton
Thomas. Online Allocation and Display Ads Optimization with Surplus Supply |
16:40-16:50 |
Break |
16:50-17:30
Session 6
Market Design
Chair: Tomer Ezra
|
Pan Xu. Exploring the Tradeoff between Competitive Ratio and Variance in Online-Matching
Markets |
Itai Feigenbaum. Strategyproofness in Kidney Exchange with Cancellations |
Wednesday, December 14
CBIS
Auditorium (west end of the building) or on Virtual Chair
|
8:00-9:00
|
Breakfast and
business meeting |
9:00-10:00
Session 7 Keynote
Chair: David Pennock |
David Simchi-Levi. Statistical Learning in
Operations: The Interplay between Online and Offline
learning
|
10:00-10:30 |
Coffee break |
10:30-11:10
Session 8
Game Theory
Chair: Zhigang Cao
|
Xiaotie Deng, Ningyuan Li, Weian Li and Qi Qi. Competition Among Parallel Contests |
Zhibin Tan, Zhigang Cao and Zhengxing Zou. Matrix-exact Covers of Minimum-Cost-Spanning-Tree
Games
|
11:10-11:20 |
Break |
11:20-12:40
Session 9
Spotlight beyond WINE
Chair: Elliot Anshelevich
|
Fatih Erdem Kizilkaya and David Kempe.
Plurality Veto: A Simple Voting Rule Achieving Optimal Metric Distortion
|
Yoav Kolumbus and Noam Nisan.
Auctions between Regret-Minimizing Agents
and
How and Why to Manipulate Your Own Agent: on the Incentives of Users of Learning Agents
|
Santiago Balseiro, Haihao Lu, and Vahab Mirrokni.
The Best of Many Worlds: Dual Mirror Descent for Online Allocation Problems
|
Shahar Dobzinski, Shiri Ron, and Jan Vondrák.
On the Hardness of Dominant Strategy Mechanism Design
|
12:40-14:10 |
Lunch at EMPAC:
the Mezzanine
area |
14:10-14:50
Session 10
Best Papers
Chair: Azarakhsh Malekian
|
Peng Shi and Junxiong Yin. Eliminating Waste in Cadaveric Organ Allocation |
Yurong Chen, Xiaotie Deng and Yuhao Li. Optimal Private Payoff Manipulation against Commitment in
Extensive-form Games |
14:50-15:00 |
Break |
15:00-16:00
Session 11
Keynote
Chair: Lirong Xia
|
Vincent Conitzer.
Automated Mechanism Design for Strategic Classification
|
16:00-16:30 |
Coffee break |
16:30-17:30
Session 12
Network
Chair: Andson Balieiro
|
Bainian Hao and Carla Michini. Inefficiency of pure Nash equilibria in series-parallel network
congestion
games |
Tong Xie and Zizhuo Wang. Personalized Assortment Optimization under Consumer Choice Models with
Local
Network Effects |
Hu Fu, Qun Hu and Jia'Nan Lin. Stability of Queueing Networks Beyond Complete Bipartite Cases
|
17:30-17:40 |
Break |
17:40-18:20
Session 13
Learning
Chair: Chun Wang
|
Will Ma and David Simchi-Levi. Constructing Demand Curves from a Single Observation of Bundle
Sales
|
Yumou Fei. Improved Approximation to First-Best Gains-from-Trade |
Thursday, December 15
CBIS
Auditorium (west end of the building) or on on Virtual Chair
|
8:00-9:00
|
Breakfast and the
virtual poster session |
9:00-10:00
Session 14 Keynote
Chair: Kristoffer
Arnsfelt Hansen
|
Robert Kleinberg. Estimating an
Empirical Distribution Using Threshold Queries
|
10:00-10:30 |
Coffee break |
10:30-11:30
Session 15
Game Theory
Chair: Rohit Vaish
|
Christine Konicki, Mithun Chakraborty and Michael Wellman. Exploiting Extensive-Form Structure in
Empirical
Game-Theoretic Analysis |
Mengqian Zhang, Yuhao Li, Jichen Li, Chaozhe Kong and Xiaotie Deng. Insightful Mining
Equilibria |
Haris Aziz, Alexander Lam, Barton Lee and Toby Walsh. Strategyproof and Proportionally Fair
Facility
Location |
11:30-11:40 |
Break |
11:40-12:40
Session 16
Learning
Chair: Yuqing Kong
|
Matthew Eichhorn, Siddhartha Banerjee and David Kempe. Online Team Formation under Different
Synergies
|
Titing Cui and Michael Hamilton. Optimal Feature-Based Market Segmentation and Pricing |
Javier Cembrano, Felix Fischer and Max Klimm. Optimal Impartial Correspondences |
12:40-14:10 |
Lunch at EMPAC:
the Mezzanine
area
|
14:10-15:10
Session 17
Mechanism Design
Chair: Sujoy Sikdar
|
Sumit Goel and Wade Hann-Caruthers. Project selection with partially verifiable information
|
Cuimin Ba. Robust Model Misspecification and Paradigm Shifts |
Atanas Dinev and Matthew Weinberg. Tight Bounds on 3-Team Manipulations in Randomized Death
Match
|
15:10-15:40 |
Coffee break |
15:40-16:40
Session 18
Learning
Chair: Yifeng Teng
|
Nick Gravin, Hao Li and Zhihao Gavin Tang. Optimal Prophet Inequality with Less than One
Sample
|
Boris Epstein and Will Ma. Order Selection Problems in Hiring Pipelines |
Jugal Garg, Edin Husić, Aniket Murhekar and László Végh. Tractable Fragments of the Maximum Nash
Welfare
Problem |
16:40-16:50 |
Break |
16:50-17:50
Session 19
Revenue Management
Chair: Pan Xu
|
Bo Jiang, Zizhuo Wang and Nanxi Zhang. Revenue Management Under a Price Alert Mechanism |
Adam Elmachtoub, Vineet Goyal, Roger Lederman and Harsh Sheth. Revenue Management with Product
Retirement
and Customer Selection |
Yuan Qiu, Jinyan Liu and Di Wang. Truthful Generalized Linear Models |
17:50-17:55 |
Closing |
Invited Speakers
Vincent Conitzer
Professor of Computer Science, Economics and Philosophy,
Carnegie Melon University
Director of the Foundations of Cooperative AI Lab
Title: Automated Mechanism Design for Strategic Classification
AI is increasingly making decisions, not only for us, but also about us -- from whether we are invited for
an interview, to whether we are proposed as a match for someone looking for a date, to whether we are
released on bail. Often, we have some control over the information that is available to the algorithm; we
can self-report some information, and other information we can choose to withhold. This creates a potential
circularity: the classifier used, mapping submitted information to outcomes, depends on the (training) data
that people provide, but the (test) data depend on the classifier, because people will reveal their
information strategically to obtain a more favorable outcome. This setting is not adversarial, but it is
also not fully cooperative.
Mechanism design provides a framework for making good decisions based on strategically reported information,
and it is commonly applied to the design of auctions and matching mechanisms. However, the setting above is
unlike these common applications, because in it, preferences tend to be similar across agents, but agents
are restricted in what they can report. This creates both new challenges and new opportunities. I will
discuss both our theoretical work and our initial experiments.
(This is joint work with Hanrui Zhang, Andrew Kephart, Yu Cheng, Anilesh Krishnaswamy, Haoming Li, and David
Rein. Papers on these topics can be found at:
https://users.cs.duke.edu/~conitzer/bytopic.html#automated%20mechanism%20design)
Bio. Vincent Conitzer is Professor of Computer Science (with affiliate/courtesy appointments
in Machine Learning, Philosophy, and the Tepper School of Business) at Carnegie Mellon University, where he
directs the Foundations of Cooperative AI Lab (FOCAL). He is also Head of Technical AI Engagement at the
Institute for Ethics in AI, and Professor of Computer Science and Philosophy, at the University of Oxford.
Previous to joining CMU, Conitzer was the Kimberly J. Jenkins Distinguished University Professor of New
Technologies and Professor of Computer Science, Professor of Economics, and Professor of Philosophy at Duke
University. He received Ph.D. (2006) and M.S. (2003) degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon
University, and an A.B. (2001) degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University.
Robert Kleinberg
Professor of Computer Science, Cornell University
Title: Estimating an Empirical Distribution Using Threshold Queries
Consider a seller experimenting with posted prices to estimate the distribution of consumers' willingness to
pay, or a participant in an advertising auction varying their bid to learn the distribution of winning bids.
Both of these parties face the problem of estimating a univariate distribution, given the ability to ask one
threshold query per sample. In this talk I will describe recent joint work with Princewill Okoroafor,
Vaishnavi Gupta, and Eleanor Goh, tackling this problem in a setting where samples could be generated by an
arbitrary (potentially even adaptive) process. Our main result quantifies, to within a constant factor, the
threshold-query complexity of estimating the empirical CDF of a sequence of elements of [n], up to a given
error tolerance in Kolmogorov distance, using one query per sample. The complexity depends only
logarithmically on n, and our result can be interpreted as extending existing logarithmic-complexity results
for noisy binary search to the more challenging non-stochastic setting. A key feature of our solution is the
use of Blackwell's Approachability Theorem to solve a related estimation problem in which simultaneous
queries are allowed.
Bio. Bobby Kleinberg is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University,
currently on sabbatical as a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google. His research concerns algorithms and
their applications to machine learning, economics, networking, and other areas. Prior to receiving his
doctorate from MIT in 2005, Kleinberg spent three years at Akamai Technologies; he and his co-workers
received the 2018 SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award for pioneering the first Internet content delivery
network. He is a Fellow of the ACM and a recipient of the Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship, an
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and an NSF CAREER Award.
Marzena Rostek
Juli Plant Grainger Distinguished Chair of Economics,
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Title: Decentralized-Market Design
Most markets are fragmented; many are dominated by large traders who have price impact. One of the most
salient developments in market design in recent years has been the work motivated by new data and questions
concerning market fragmentation and imperfect competition. This talk will review recent advances in the
literature on (primarily though not exclusively financial) market design and highlight active research
areas.
Bio. Marzena Rostek is the Juli Plant Grainger Distinguished Chair of Economics at the
University of
Wisconsin-Madison. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University (2006) and was a postdoctoral research fellow
at Nuffield College at Oxford University (2007/8). Her research is in the area of market design, with a
special focus on the effects of market fragmentation and the strategic behavior of large players. Rostek
currently serves as an editor of the Journal of Economic Theory and an associate editor of Econometrica,
Economic Theory, Economic Theory Bulletin, and the Journal of Economic Literature. She is a board member of
the Finance Theory Group, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the Society for the Advancement of
Economic Theory.
David Simchi-Levi
Professor of Engineering Systems, MIT
Director of MIT Data Science Lab
Title: Statistical Learning in Operations: The Interplay between Online and Offline learning
Machine learning is playing an increasingly important role in decision making, with key applications ranging
from dynamic pricing and recommendation systems to personalized medicine and clinical trials. While
supervised machine learning traditionally excels at making predictions based on i.i.d. offline data, many
modern decision-making tasks require making sequential decisions based on data collected online. Bridging
the gap between offline supervised learning and online decision making may help significantly improve
decisions.
In this talk, we first show how difficult online decision-making problems can be reduced to well-understood
offline regression problems. We than show the impact of pre-existing offline data on online learning and
characterize conditions under which offline data helps (does not help) improve online learning.
We demonstrate the impact of our work in the context of recommendation systems, multiclass classification
problems and dynamic pricing.
Bio. David Simchi-Levi is a Professor of Engineering
Systems at MIT and serves as the head of the MIT Data Science Lab. He is considered one of the premier
thought leaders in supply chain management and business analytics.
His Ph.D. students have accepted faculty positions in leading academic institutes including U. of California
Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon U., Columbia U., Cornell U., Duke U., Georgia Tech, Harvard U., U. of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, U. of Michigan, Purdue U. and Virginia Tech.
Professor Simchi-Levi is the current Editor-in-Chief of Management Science, one of the two flagship journals
of INFORMS. He served as the Editor-in-Chief for Operations Research (2006-2012), the other flagship journal
of INFORMS and for Naval Research Logistics (2003-2005).
In 2020, he was awarded the prestigious INFORMS Impact Prize for playing a leading role in developing and
disseminating a new highly impactful paradigm for the identification and mitigation of risks in global
supply chains.
He is an INFORMS Fellow and MSOM Distinguished Fellow and the recipient of the 2020 INFORMS Koopman Award
given to an outstanding publication in military operations research; Ford Motor Company 2015 Engineering
Excellence Award; 2014 INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice; 2014
INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Practice Award; and 2009 INFORMS Revenue Management and
Pricing Section Prize.
He was the founder of LogicTools which provided software solutions and professional services for supply
chain optimization. LogicTools became part of IBM in 2009. In 2012 he co-founded OPS Rules, an operations
analytics consulting company. The company became part of Accenture in 2016. In 2014, he co-founded
Opalytics, a cloud analytics platform company focusing on operations and supply chain decisions. The company
became part of the Accenture Applied Intelligence in 2018.
General Chairs
Program Committee Chairs
Senior Program Committee Members
- Itai Ashlagi, Stanford University
- Haris Aziz, Unsw Sydney
- Moshe Babaioff,
Microsoft
- Santiago Balseiro, Columbia University
- Omar Besbes, Columbia University
- Ozan Candogan, University Of
Chicago
- Jing Chen, Stony Brook
University, New York
- Xujin Chen, Chinese Academy Of Sciences
- Yi-chun Chen, National University Of Singapore
- Bolin Ding, Alibaba Group
- Shahar Dobzinski, Weizmann Institute Of
Science
- Aris Filos-ratsikas, University Of Liverpool
- Hu Fu, Shanghai University Of Finance And Economics
- Nima Haghpanah, Penn State University
- Tobias
Harks, University Of Augsburg
- Martin Hoefer, Goethe University
Frankfurt
- Ayumi Igarashi, National
Institute Of Informatics
- Yuqing Kong, Peking University
- Irene Lo, Stanford University
- Brendan Lucier,
Microsoft
- Ali Makhdoumi, Duke
University
- Malesh Pai, Rice University
- Qi Qi, Renmin University
- Daniela Saban, Stanford University
- Balu Sivan, Google Research New York
- Christos Tzamos, University Of Wisconsin-madison
- Carmine Ventre, King's College
London
- Matt Weinberg, Princeton University
- Lirong Xia, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
- Jun Zhang, Nanjing Audit University
Program Committee Members
- Mete Şeref Ahunbay, Technical University of Munich
- Elliot Anshelevich, Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute
- Jackie Baek, MIT
- Xiaohui Bei, Nanyang Technological
University
- Hedyeh Beyhaghi, CMU
- Kodric Bojana, Gran Sasso Science Institute
- Modibo Camara, University of Chicago
- Zhigang Cao, Beijing Jiaotong
University
- Bhaskar Ray Chaudhury, University of
Illinois at Urbana Champaign
- Ningyuan Chen, University of
Toronto Mississauga
- Yukun Cheng, Suzhou University of Science
and Technology
- Giorgos Christodoulou, Aristotle
University of Thessaloniki
- Argyrios Deligkas, Royal Holloway
University of London
- Yuan Deng, Google Research
- Songzi Du, University of California San Diego
- Zhixuan Fang, Tsinghua University
- Yiding Feng, Microsoft Research
- Diodato Ferraioli, University of Salerno
- Matheus Ferreira, Harvard University
- Huiyi Guo, Texas A&M
- Huseyin Gurkan,
SMT Berlin
- Kevin He, University of Pennsylvania
- Alexandros Hollender,
University of Oxford
- Bart De Keijzer, King's College London
- Philip Lazos, IOHK
- Pascal Lenzner, Hasso
Plattner Institute
- Stefanos Leonardos, King’s College London
- Bo Li, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
- Jiangtao Li, Singapore Management University
- Mengling Li, Xiamen University
- Yingkai Li, Northwestern University
- Thodoris Lykouris, MIT
- Will Ma, Columbia
- Jieming Mao, Google Research
- Faidra Monachou, Stanford
- Swaprava Nath, Indian Institute of
Technology Bombay
- Dario Paccagnan, Imperial London
- Harry Pei, Northwestern
- Emmanouil Pountourakis, Drexel University
- Nidhi Rathi, Aarhus University
- Scott Rodilitz, Stanford
- Kang Rong, Shanghai University of Finance and
Economics
- Daniel Schmand, University of Bremen
- Grant Schoenebeck, University of
Michigan
- Ariel Schvartzman, DIMACS
- Sujoy Sikdar, Binghamton University
- Xiang Sun, Wuhan University
- Biaoshuai Tao, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
- Nguyễn Kim Thắng, University
Paris-Saclay
- Taiki Todo, Kyushu University
- Cosimo Vinci, University of Salerno
- Alexandros Voudouris, University of Essex
- Changjun Wang, Chinese Academy of Sciences
- Chun Wang, Tsinghua
University
- Zihe Wang, Renmin University of China
- Zenan Wu, Peking University
- Yiqing Xing, Johns Hopkins
University
- Fang-yi Yu, George Mason Univeresity
- Yuan Yuan, Purdue
- Boyu Zhang, Beijing Normal
University
- Mu Zhang, University of Michigan
- Dengji Zhao, Shanghai Tech University
- Jingtong
Zhao, Renmin University of China
Steering Committee
- Xiaotie Deng, Peking University, China
- Paul Goldberg, Oxford University, UK
- Christos Papadimitriou, Columbia University, USA
- Paul Spirakis, University
of Liverpool, UK
- Rakesh Vohra, University of Pennsylvania, USA
- Andrew Yao, Tsinghua University, China
- Yinyu Ye, Stanford University, USA
- Nicole Immorlica, Microsoft Research
Lab, USA (joint ACM-EC/WINE executive committee)
-
Scott Kominers, Harvard University, USA (joint ACM-EC/WINE executive
committee)
-
Katrina Ligett, Hebrew University, Israel (joint
ACM-EC/WINE executive committee)
Tutorials Dec 12
1. Economics of Distributed Systems (9-11 am ET)
The design of consensus protocols for blockchain applications is an emerging field at the intersection of
economics and computation. The field is truly interdisciplinary, requiring background in areas not
typically
present at EC, such as distributed computing and cryptography. The goal of this tutorial is to provide
background in these core areas, and connect them to modern blockchain research. The tutorial will cover
the
following themes:
-
Theory of Distributed Systems This section of the tutorial will cover classical modeling
approaches
and impossibility results. It will also introduce simple, practical algorithms, and relate this theory
to
modern cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
-
Cryptography This section of the tutorial will introduce cryptographic primitives through the
lens
of
‘replacing a trusted mediator’, and use this view to relate these concepts to modern cryptocurrencies.
-
Mechanism Design Challenges This section of the tutorial will briefly highlight existing examples
of
work with an EC flavor, and describe their models through lenses introduced by the previous two themes.
This tutorial will be accessible to both Economists and Computer Scientists. No prior knowledge of
distributed
systems or cryptography will be assumed. We hope that the tutorial will also be valuable to researchers in
the
EC community with moderate background in distributed systems or cryptography, and who wish to engage
further
with blockchain research.
2. AI and Marketing (1-3 pm ET)
- Oded Netzer (Columbia University) –
Automating the B2B Salesperson Pricing Decisions: Can Machines
Replace Humans and When? (AI Ethics)
- Gideon Nave (University of Pennsylvania, Wharton)
–
We Are What We Watch: Movie Plots Predict the
Personalities of Their Fans
(Supervised Learning, NLP)
- Robert Moakler (Meta) –
Close
enough? A large-scale exploration of non-experimental approaches to
advertising measurement (Machine learning for Causal inference)
- Xiao Liu (New York University,
Stern) – Dynamic Coupon Targeting Using Batch Deep Reinforcement
Learning: An Application to Livestream Shopping (Reinforcement Learning)
Marketing, according to Phillip Kotler’s textbook, is the process by which companies create value for
customers and build strong customer relationships to capture value from customers in return. Marketing
contains the marketing mix, which is the four Ps, namely, product, price, place, and promotion strategies.
So,
in essence, we can think of marketing research as a function f, which connects the 4P strategies, or the X
variables, to the outcome Y variable, which is the customer value and relationship, i.e., Y=f(X).
AI can affect each element in this function and each of the 4Ps. And the way AI helps solve marketing
questions depends on the type of the question, namely, descriptive, predictive, or prescriptive questions.
If
the question is descriptive, AI can help describe the marketing stimuli by creating new variables from
unstructured data, i.e., new X and Y variables. For instance, in this tutorial, one study will demonstrate
how
to use NLP algorithms to analyze movies, a popular product for consumers. If the question is predictive
where
the variable interest is the predicted outcome, beta Y, AI can be used for more accurate prediction. For
instance, one paper in this tutorial uses machine learning algorithms to predict firm profit. If the
question
is prescriptive, AI can assist in scalable causal inference and policy designs via innovations in the f
function. In this tutorial, we demonstrate two examples of prescriptive questions, one in a static setting
for
promotion analysis (advertisement effect measurement) and the other in a dynamic setting for pricing.
Lastly,
we also discuss an AI ethics topic about whether machines can replace humans in a standard marketing
place,
the B2B salesforce context.
3. Machine Learning in Strategic Settings (3:30-5:30 ET)
This tutorial will cover the setting where a deployed machine learning model will face strategic actions
at
the test time. In this setup, each data (X (feature),Y (label)) that is to be classified will correspond
to
an
agent who can respond in their own best interest by reporting an X’ that can differ from X. Knowing the
presence of strategic behavior, the goal of the learner is to train a model (using the available training
data) that minimizes the test prediction error while carrying the thought that the test data will come
from
the agent’s strategic reports. This above setting is often referred to as the “strategic machine learning”
problem.
The tutorial will start by briefly introducing adversarial machine learning, a highly relevant concept,
and
the “classical” way of looking at this class of problems from the machine learning+security perspective.
We
then introduce the formal setup of strategic machine learning, motivated by different considerations and
targeting different domains, but with most models having a similar formalization. We will discuss the
technical challenges, as well as solutions to this problem. Several variants of the strategic machine
learning
setups will be discussed as well. The second half of the tutorial will highlight some emerging challenges
and
technical questions, including fairness concerns in the strategic machine learning setting.
COVID Policy
All visitors on campus for a full day or longer are required to prove that they are fully vaccinated or have had
a negative COVID-19 test in the previous 48 hours.
Please refer to RPI's COVID policy for more information.
By Air
The nearest airport is Albany International Airport (ALB). Major US airline companies offer flights to the
Albany International airport.
By Train
Albany–Rensselaer station serves 10 trains each way between Albany and New York City per day. Each trip takes
about 2.5 hours. There are also at least two buses between Albany and Boston per day. Each trip takes about
3.5 hours.
From Airport/Train/Bus station to RPI
The best way is by taxi, Uber, or Lyft. Public transportation in Albany area is not very convenient.
Location
The main conference venue is CBIS Auditorium and Gallery at RPI (marked in red)
Accommodation
Two hotels are within walking distance (see the map above). Please make your reservation directly with the
hotel.
-
Hilton Garden Inn Troy, 235 Hoosick Street, Troy, New York, 12180, USA
-
Best Western Plus Franklin Square Inn Troy/Albany, 1 4th St, Troy, NY 12180, USA
-
Courtyard by Marriott Albany Troy/Waterfront, 515 River St, Troy, NY 12180, USA
Hotels that need driving. Please make your reservation directly with the hotel.
More affordable housing options can be found on airbnb.
|
Registrations on or before November 12, 2022
|
Registrations after November 12, 2022
|
Students |
$100 |
$150 |
Regular rate applied to all others |
$200 |
$300 |
Virtual attendance |
$50 |
$50 |
Cancellation deadline: Dec. 1
-
All registrations must be prepaid with a credit card (VISA/Mastercard accepted) or echeck at the time of
registration.
-
Registration fees include: participation in the main conference (Dec 13-15), tutorial day (Dec 12), as well
as breakfast, lunch, breaks and any scheduled social events (if applicable) during the main conference days
(Dec 13-15).
Previous WINEs
- WINE 2021, Potsdam, Germany
- WINE 2020, Beijing,
China
- WINE 2019, New York, USA
- WINE 2018, Oxford, UK
- WINE 2017, Bangalore, India
- WINE 2016, Montreal, Canada
- WINE 2015, Amsterdam, Netherlands
- WINE 2014, Beijing, China
- WINE 2013, Harvard, USA
- WINE 2012, Liverpool, UK
- WINE 2011, Singapore
- WINE 2010, Stanford, USA
- WINE 2009, Rome, Italy
- WINE 2008, Shanghai, China
- WINE 2007, San Diego, USA
- WINE 2006, Patras, Greece
- WINE 2005, Hong Kong, China