TITLE: Trade-offs in Cost-sharing

SPEAKER: Mukund Sundararajan
         Stanford University

ABSTRACT:

Auctions often involve multiple objectives in conflict. We focus on
cost-sharing mechanisms for network design problems. Such auctions incur
a cost dependent on the subset of players serviced. We would like
such auctions to recover cost, be incentive compatible and maximize
social efficiency (defined as the total value to the participants). 
Though it was well known that the three objectives cannot be achieved
simultaneously, there was no meaningful way of quantifying the tension
between the auction objectives. We propose a framework in which we 
express trade-offs between the auction objectives.

The talk is based on joint work with Tim Roughgarden, Aranyak Mehta and
Shuchi Chawla.