Mechanism Learning with Mechanism Induced Data

Machine learning and game theory are two important directions of AI. The former usually assumes data is independent of the models to be learned; the latter usually assumes agents are fully rational. In many modern Internet applications, like sponsored search and crowdsourcing, the two basic assumptions are violated and new challenges are posed to both machine learning and game theory. To better model and study such applications, we need to go beyond conventional machine learning and game theory (mechanism design), and adopt a new approach called mechanism learning with mechanism induced data. Specifically, we propose to learn a behavior model from data to describe how “real” agents play the complicated game, instead of making the fullrationality assumption. Then we propose to optimize the mechanism by using the learned behavior models to predict the future behaviors of agents in response to the new mechanism. Because the above process couples mechanism learning and behavior learning in a loop, new algorithms and theories are needed to perform the task and guarantee the asymptotical performance. As shown in this paper, there are many interesting research topics along this direction, many of which are still open problems, waiting for researchers in our community to