Complexity-minded antitrust

On complexity of single-minded auction

We consider complexity issues for a special type of combinatorial auctions, the single-minded auction, where every agent is interested in only one subset of the commodities. First, we present a matching bound on the communication complexity for the single-minded auction under a general communication model. Next, we prove that it is NP-hard to decide whether Walrasian equilibrium exists in a sin...

Antitrust Laws: the Nurse Wages Antitrust Litigation

Social Minded Commitment Management

Over the past 30 years Artificial Intelligence has fragmented from one broad subject into a cluster of narrow but deep individual disciplines. During this time we have also seen the development of increasingly complex software systems for application domains such as robot control, mobile computing, and expert system interfaces. Many of these designs use elements from the branches of AI, but pay...

The Absent-Minded Driver

The example of the ‘‘absent-minded driver’’ was introduced by Piccione and Rubinstein in the context of games and decision problems with imperfect recall. They claim that a ‘‘paradox’’ or ‘‘inconsistency’’ arises when the decision reached at the ‘‘planning stage’’ is compared with that at the ‘‘action stage.’’ Though the example is provocative and worth having, their analysis is questionable. A...

Are Individuals Fickle-Minded?

Game theory has been used to model large-scale social events—such constitutional law, democratic stability, standard setting, gender roles, social movements, communication, markets, the selection of officials by means of elections, coalition formation, resource allocation, distribution of goods, and war—as the aggregate result of individual choices in interdependent decision-making. Game theory...