EC'09 ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce

Tutorial Schedule



All talks in McCaw Auditorium in the Alumni Center at Stanford University
Wednesday July 8, 2009
8:50 AM - 9:00 AM
Welcome Remarks
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

Joint EC-TARK Keynote Address
Susan Athey, Harvard University and Microsoft

Designing Markets: Economics, Computer Science and the Real World
The recent explosion of electronic commerce has frequently brought together economists, computer scientists, and businesses in the pursuit of new designs for markets that succeed in attracting participants and becoming viable businesses. Real-world design has been guided by theoretical insights, empirical evidence and practical experience. This talk explores what issues are most important for guiding real-world design, where new theory and evidence are needed to answer questions of practical importance, as well as what kinds of conceptual frameworks, insights and approaches have the most influence and relevance in practice.

Session 1 - Chair: Yiling Chen
10:20 AM - 12:00 PM

On the Complexity of Nash Dynamics and Sink equilibria
Vahab Mirrokni, Google, Alexander Skopalik, RWTH Aachen

On Representing Coalitional Games with Externalities
Tomasz Michalak, University of Liverpool, Talal Rahwan, University of Southampton, Jacek Sroka, University of Warsaw Adrew Dowell, University of Liverpool, Micheal Wooldridge, University of Liverpool Peter McBurney, University of Liverpool, Nicholas Jennings, University of Southampton

Pricing Traffic in a Spanning Network
Herve Moulin, Rice University

A New Perspective on Implementation by Voting Trees
Felix Fischer, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Ariel Procaccia, Microsoft Alex Samorodnitsky, Hebrew University

Session 2 - Chair: Edith Elkind
2:00 PM - 3:40 PM

Limited and Online Supply and the Bayesian Foundations of Prior-Free Mechanism Design
Nikhil Devanur, Microsoft Research, Jason Hartline, Northwestern University

Computational Analysis of Perfect-Information Position Auctions
David Thompson, University of British Columbia, Kevin Leyton-Brown, University of British Columbia

Selling Ad Campaigns: Online Algorithms with Cancellations
Moshe Babaioff, Micosoft Research, Jason Hartline, Northwestern University
Robert Kleinberg, Cornell University

The Adwords Problem: Online Keyword Matching with Budgeted Bidders under Random Permutations
Nikhil Devanur, Microsoft Research, Thomas Hayes, University of New Mexico

Session 3 - Chair: Gagan Aggrawal
4:00 PM - 5:40 PM

Characterizing Truthful Multi-Armed Bandit Mechanisms
Moshe Babaioff, Microsoft Research, Yogeshwer Sharma, Cornell University
Aleksandrs Slivkins, Microsoft Research

Self-Correcting Sampling-Based Dynamic Multi-Unit Auctions
Florin Constantin, Harvard, David Parkes, Harvard

The Price of Truthfulness for Pay-Per-Click Auctions
Nikhil Devanur, Microsoft Research, Sham Kakade, TTI Chicago

Bayes-Nash Equilibria of the Generalized Second Price
Renato Gomes, Northwestern University, Kane Sweeney, Northwestern University

5:40 PM - 6:00 PM
Business Meeting
Thursday July 9, 2009
Session 4 - Chair: Kevin Leyton-Brown
8:40 AM - 10:20 AM

Eliciting Truthful Answers to Multiple-Choice Questions
Nicolas Lambert, Stanford University, Yoav Shoham, Stanford University

Crowdsourcing and All-Pay Auctions
Dominic DiPalantino, Stanford University, Milan Vojnovic, Microsoft Research Cambridge

Designing Incentives for Online Question and Answers Forums
Shaili Jain, Harvard University, Yiling Chen, Harvard University, David Parkes, Harvard University

Substitutes or Complements: Another Step Forward in Recommendations
Jiaqian Zheng, Fudan University, Xiaoyuan Wu, eBay Research Lab
Junyu Niu, Fudan University, Alvaro Bolivar, eBay Research Lab

Session 5 - Chair: Nicole Immorlica
10:40 AM - 12:20 PM

Optimal Collusion-Resistant Mechanisms with Verification
Paolo Penna, Università di Salerno, Carmine Ventre, University of Liverpool

But Who Will Monitor the Monitor?
David Rahman, University of Minnesota

Network Bargaining: Algorithms and Structural Results
Tanmoy Chakraborty, University of Pennsylvania, Michael Kearns, University of Pennsylvania
Sanjeev Khanna, University of Pennsylvania

An Optimal Lower Bound for Anonymous Scheduling Mechanisms
Itai Ashlagi, Harvard, Shahar Dobzinski, Hebrew University, Ron Lavi, Technion

Session 6 - Chair: Jason Hartline
2:00 PM - 3:40 PM

Approximate Mechanism Design Without Money
Ariel Procaccia, Microsoft, Moshe Tennenholtz, Microsoft

On Random Sampling Auctions for Digital Goods
Saeed Alaei, University of Maryland, Azarakhsh Malekian, University of Maryland
Aravind Srinivasan, University of Maryland

A Qualitative Vickrey Auction
Paul Harrenstein, University of Munich, Mathijs de Weerdt, Delft University of Technology
Vincent Conitzer, Duke University

Destroy to Save
Geoffroy de Clippel, Brown University, Victor Naroditskiy, Brown University
Amy Greenwald, Brown University

Session 7 - Chair: Moshe Babaioff
4:00 - 5:40 PM

Managing the Quality of CPC Traffic
Bobji Mungamuru, Stanford University, Hector Garcia-Molina, Stanford University

Simple versus Optimal Mechanisms
Jason Hartline, Northwestern University, Tim Roughgarden, Stanford University

Efficiency of (Revenue-)Optimal Mechanisms
Gagan Aggarwal, Google, Gagan Goel, Georgia Tech, Aranyak Mehta, Google

Revenue Submodularity
Mukund Sundararajan, Stanford University, Tim Roughgarden, Stanford University
Shaddin Dughmi, Stanford University

6:00 PM - 8:45 PM

Banquet

Conference Banquet
Google Headquarters
Building 45 - Cafe Moma
1585 Charleston Road
Mountain View, CA 94043


Busses depart Stanford Alumni Center at 6:00PM and return 8:45PM.

Friday July 10, 2009
9:00 AM - 10:00 AM
EC Keynote Address
Michael Moritz, Sequoia Capital
Session 8 - Chair: Rahul Sami
10:20 AM - 12:00 PM

Information Aggregation in Dynamic Markets with Strategic Traders
Michael Ostrovsky, Stanford University

A Unified Framework for Dynamic Pari-Mutuel Information Market Design
Shipra Agrawal, Stanford University, Erick Delage, Stanford University, Mark Peters, Stanford University
Zizhuo Wang, Stanford University, Yinyu Ye, Stanford University

Collective Revelation: A Mechanism for Self-Verified, Weighted, and Truthful Predictions
Sharad Goel, Yahoo! Research, Daniel Reeves, Yahoo! Research, David Pennock, Yahoo! Research

Modeling Volatility in Prediction Markets
Nikolay Archak, New York University, Panagiotis Ipeirotis, New York University

Session 9 - Chair: Michael Ostrovsky
2:00 PM - 3:40 PM

The Price of Uncertainty
Maria-Florina Balcan, Microsoft Research, Avrim Blum, Carnegie Mellon University
Yishay Mansour, Tel-Aviv University and Google Research

Policy Teaching Through Reward Function Learning
Haoqi Zhang, Harvard University, David Parkes, Harvard University, Yiling Chen, Harvard University

The Price of Anarchy in Bertrand Games
Suschi Chawla, University of Wisconsin, Feng Niu, University of Wisconsin

On the Price of Mediation
Milan Bradonjic, Los Alamos National Labs, Gunes Ercal-Ozkaya, Kansas University
Adam Meyerson, UCLA, Alan Roytman, UCLA

Session 10 - Chair: Suschi Chawla
4:00 PM - 5:40 PM

Social Influence and the Diffusion of User-Created Content
Eytan Bakshy, University of Michigan, Brian Karrer, University of Michigan
Lada Adamic, University of Michigan

Social Lending
Ning Chen, Nanyang Technological University, Arpita Ghosh, Yahoo! Research
Nicolas Lambert, Stanford University

Sybilproof Trust Exchange Protocols
Paul Resnick, University of Michigan, Rahul Sami, University of Michigan

An Exact Almost Optimal Algorithm for Target Set Selection in Social Networks
Oren Ben-Zwi, Haifa University, Danny Hermelin, Haifa University
Daniel Lokshtanov, University of Bergen, Ilan Newman, Haifa University