CS364B: Frontiers in Mechanism Design Lecture #1: Ascending and Ex Post Incentive Compatible Mechanisms∗

These twenty lectures cover advanced topics in mechanism design. They assume familiarity with some of the material covered in the instructor’s CS364A course — specifically, lectures 2–4 and 7–9. Recall that mechanism design is the “science of rule-making.” The goal is to understand how to design systems with strategic participants — autonomous decision-makers whose objectives are generally different from the the designer’s — that have good performance guarantees. For example, a mechanism designer might want to compute a socially efficient allocation of scarce resources or raise significant revenue, while a mechanism participant only cares about its own utility.