Prior-independent Mechanism
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Prior-independent Mechanism
A Prior-independent mechanism (PIM) is a mechanism in which the designer knows that the agents' valuations are drawn from some probability distribution, but does not know the distribution. A typical application is a seller who wants to sell some items to potential buyers. The seller wants to price the items in a way that will maximize his profit. The optimal prices depend on the amount that each buyer is willing to pay for each item. The seller does not know these values, but he assumes that the values are random variables with some unknown probability distribution. A PIM usually involves a random sampling process. The seller samples some valuations from the unknown distribution, and based on the samples, constructs an auction that yields approximately-optimal profits. The major research question in PIM design is: what is the sample complexity of the mechanism? I.e, how many agents it needs to sample in order to attain a reasonable approximation of the optimal welfare? Single-it ...
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Mechanism Design
Mechanism design is a field in economics and game theory that takes an objectives-first approach to designing economic mechanisms or incentives, toward desired objectives, in strategic settings, where players act rationally. Because it starts at the end of the game, then goes backwards, it is also called reverse game theory. It has broad applications, from economics and politics in such fields as market design, auction theory and social choice theory to networked-systems (internet interdomain routing, sponsored search auctions). Mechanism design studies solution concepts for a class of private-information games. Leonid Hurwicz explains that 'in a design problem, the goal function is the main "given", while the mechanism is the unknown. Therefore, the design problem is the "inverse" of traditional economic theory, which is typically devoted to the analysis of the performance of a given mechanism.' So, two distinguishing features of these games are: * that a game "designer" choos ...
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Shuchi Chawla
Shuchi Chawla is an Indian computer scientist who works in the design and analysis of algorithms, and is known for her research on correlation clustering, information privacy, mechanism design, approximation algorithms, hardness of approximation, and algorithmic bias. She works as a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. Education and career Chawla earned a bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 2000, and received her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005. Her dissertation, ''Graph Algorithms for Planning and Partitioning'', was supervised by Avrim Blum. After postdoctoral studies at Stanford University under the mentorship of Tim Roughgarden, and at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley, she joined the Wisconsin faculty in 2006.. She joined the UT-Austin faculty in 2021. She won a Sloan Research Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide ...
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Mechanism Design
Mechanism design is a field in economics and game theory that takes an objectives-first approach to designing economic mechanisms or incentives, toward desired objectives, in strategic settings, where players act rationally. Because it starts at the end of the game, then goes backwards, it is also called reverse game theory. It has broad applications, from economics and politics in such fields as market design, auction theory and social choice theory to networked-systems (internet interdomain routing, sponsored search auctions). Mechanism design studies solution concepts for a class of private-information games. Leonid Hurwicz explains that 'in a design problem, the goal function is the main "given", while the mechanism is the unknown. Therefore, the design problem is the "inverse" of traditional economic theory, which is typically devoted to the analysis of the performance of a given mechanism.' So, two distinguishing features of these games are: * that a game "designer" choos ...
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Algorithmic Pricing
Algorithmic pricing is the practice of automatically setting the requested price for items for sale, in order to maximize the seller's profits. Dynamic pricing algorithms usually rely on one or more of the following data. * Probabilistic and statistical information on potential buyers; see Bayesian-optimal pricing. * Prices of competitors. E.g., a seller of an item may automatically detect the lowest price currently offered for that item, and suggest a price within $1 of that price. * Personal information of the currently active buyer, such as her or his demographics and her or his interest in the product. If the seller detects that you are about to buy, your price goes up. * Business information of the seller, such as the expected date in which he or she is going to receive new stocks, or her or his target selling velocity in units per day. See also * Algorithmic trading * Contribution margin * Price optimization software * Pricing * Tacit collusion * Yield management Yield m ...
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Market Research
Market research is an organized effort to gather information about target markets and customers: know about them, starting with who they are. It is an important component of business strategy and a major factor in maintaining competitiveness. Market research helps to identify and analyze the needs of the market, the market size and the competition. Its techniques encompass both qualitative techniques such as focus groups, in-depth interviews, and ethnography, as well as quantitative techniques such as customer surveys, and analysis of secondary data. It includes social and opinion research, and is the systematic gathering and interpretation of information about individuals or organizations using statistical and analytical methods and techniques of the applied social sciences to gain insight or support decision making. Market research, marketing research, and marketing are a sequence of business activities; sometimes these are handled informally. The field of ''marketing researc ...
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Worst-case
In computer science, best, worst, and average cases of a given algorithm express what the resource usage is ''at least'', ''at most'' and ''on average'', respectively. Usually the resource being considered is running time, i.e. time complexity, but could also be memory or some other resource. Best case is the function which performs the minimum number of steps on input data of n elements. Worst case is the function which performs the maximum number of steps on input data of size n. Average case is the function which performs an average number of steps on input data of n elements. In real-time computing, the worst-case execution time is often of particular concern since it is important to know how much time might be needed ''in the worst case'' to guarantee that the algorithm will always finish on time. Average performance and worst-case performance are the most used in algorithm analysis. Less widely found is best-case performance, but it does have uses: for example, where the ...
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Prior-free Mechanism
A prior-free mechanism (PFM) is a mechanism in which the designer does not have any information on the agents' valuations, not even that they are random variables from some unknown probability distribution. A typical application is a seller who wants to sell some items to potential buyers. The seller wants to price the items in a way that will maximize his profit. The optimal prices depend on the amount that each buyer is willing to pay for each item. The seller does not know these amounts, and cannot even assume that the amounts are drawn from a probability distribution. The seller's goal is to design an auction that will produce a reasonable profit even in worst-case scenarios. PFMs should be contrasted with two other mechanism types: * Bayesian-optimal mechanisms (BOM) assume that the agents' valuations are drawn from a known probability distribution. The mechanism is tailored to the parameters of this distribution (e.g, its median or mean value). * Prior-independent mechanis ...
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Bayesian-optimal Mechanism
A Bayesian-optimal mechanism (BOM) is a mechanism in which the designer does not know the valuations of the agents for whom the mechanism is designed, but the designer knows that they are random variables and knows the probability distribution of these variables. A typical application is a seller who wants to sell some items to potential buyers. The seller wants to price the items in a way that will maximize their profit. The optimal prices depend on the amount that each buyer is willing to pay for each item. The seller does not know these amounts, but assumes that they are drawn from a certain known probability distribution. The phrase "Bayesian optimal mechanism design" has the following meaning: * Bayesian means that we know the probability distribution from which the agents' valuations are drawn (in contrast to prior-free mechanism design, which do not assume any prior probability distribution). * Optimal means that we want to maximize the expected revenue of the auctioneer, wher ...
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Makespan
In operations research, the makespan of a project is the length of time that elapses from the start of work to the end. This type of multi-mode resource constrained project scheduling problem (MRCPSP) seeks to create the shortest logical project schedule, by efficiently using project resources, adding the lowest number of additional resources as possible to achieve the minimum makespan.A solution procedure for preemptive multi-mode project scheduling problem with mode changeability to resumption
', Afshar-Nadjafi, B, ''in Applied Computing and Informatics (2014) The term commonly appears in the context of

Unit Demand
In economics, a unit demand agent is an agent who wants to buy a single item, which may be of one of different types. A typical example is a buyer who needs a new car. There are many different types of cars, but usually a buyer will choose only one of them, based on the quality and the price. If there are ''m'' different item-types, then a unit-demand valuation function is typically represented by ''m'' values v_1,\dots,v_m, with v_j representing the subjective value that the agent derives from item j. If the agent receives a set A of items, then his total utility is given by: :u(A)=\max_v_j since he enjoys the most valuable item from A and ignores the rest. Therefore, if the price of item j is p_j, then a unit-demand buyer will typically want to buy a single item – the item j for which the net utility v_j - p_j is maximized. Ordinal and cardinal definitions A unit-demand valuation is formally defined by: * For a preference relation: for every set B there is a subset A\subsete ...
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Probability Distribution
In probability theory and statistics, a probability distribution is the mathematical function that gives the probabilities of occurrence of different possible outcomes for an experiment. It is a mathematical description of a random phenomenon in terms of its sample space and the probabilities of events (subsets of the sample space). For instance, if is used to denote the outcome of a coin toss ("the experiment"), then the probability distribution of would take the value 0.5 (1 in 2 or 1/2) for , and 0.5 for (assuming that the coin is fair). Examples of random phenomena include the weather conditions at some future date, the height of a randomly selected person, the fraction of male students in a school, the results of a survey to be conducted, etc. Introduction A probability distribution is a mathematical description of the probabilities of events, subsets of the sample space. The sample space, often denoted by \Omega, is the set of all possible outcomes of a random phe ...
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VC Dimension
VC may refer to: Military decorations * Victoria Cross, a military decoration awarded by the United Kingdom and also by certain Commonwealth nations ** Victoria Cross for Australia ** Victoria Cross (Canada) ** Victoria Cross for New Zealand * Victorious Cross, Idi Amin's self-bestowed military decoration Organisations * Ocean Airlines (IATA airline designator 2003-2008), Italian cargo airline * Voyageur Airways (IATA airline designator since 1968), Canadian charter airline * Visual Communications, an Asian-Pacific-American media arts organization in Los Angeles, US * Viet Cong (also Victor Charlie or Vietnamese Communists), a political and military organization from the Vietnam War (1959–1975) Education * Vanier College, Canada * Vassar College, US * Velez College, Philippines * Virginia College, US Places * Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (ISO country code), a state in the Caribbean * Sri Lanka (ICAO airport prefix code) * Watsonian vice-counties, subdivisions of Great Brita ...
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