We consider mechanism design issues for scheduling problems and we survey some recent developments on this important problem in Algorithmic Game Theory. We treat both the related and the unrelated version of the problem. 1 The scheduling problem The problem of scheduling unrelated machines [21, 14] is one of the most fundamental algorithmic problems: There are n machines and m tasks∗ and machin...

Mechanism design has traditionally focused almost exclusively on the design of truthful mechanisms. There are several drawbacks to this: 1. in certain settings (e.g. voting settings), no desirable strategyproof mechanisms exist; 2. truthful mechanisms are unable to take advantage of the fact that computationally bounded agents may not be able to find the best manipulation, and 3. when designing...

A mechanism is said to be renegotiation-proof if it is robust against renegotiation both before and after it is played. We ask (1) what kind of environments admit the renegotiation-proof implementation of some social choice rules? (2) for a given environment, what kind of social choice rule are implementable in a way that is renegotiationproof? and (3) for a given renegotiation-proof implementa...

We consider mechanism design and redesign for markets like Internet advertising where many frequent, small transactions are organized by a principal. Mechanisms for these markets rarely have truthtelling equilibria. We identify a family of winner-pays-bid mechanisms for such markets that exhibit three properties. First, equilibria in these mechanisms are simple. Second, the mechanisms’ paramete...

Systems wherein strategic agents compete for limited resources are ubiquitous: the economy, computer networks, social networks, congestion networks, nature, etc. Assuming the agents’ preferences are drawn from a distribution, which is a reasonable assumption for small mechanisms in a large system, Bayesian mechanism design governs the design and analysis of these systems. This article surveys t...

We study the design of incentive-compatible mechanisms in general dynamic environments where information arrives gradually over time and decisions are made over multiple periods. Our first main result is a necessary condition for incentive compatibility that takes the form of an envelope formula for the derivative of an agent’s equilibrium expected payoff with respect to his current type. It co...

We introduce a model in which agents face random and unobservable needs to transact over time. We characterize the optimal setup for incentive compatible transactions, the optimal payment system. The existence of an equilibrium in which agents transact through a payment system might require certain caps on short-term borrowing. Networks that have knowledge of agents’ histories support efficient...

Mechanism design experiments bridge the gap between a theoretical mechanism and an actual economic process. In the domain of public goods, matching and combinatorial auctions, laboratory experiments identify features of mechanisms which lead to good performance when implemented among boundedly rational agents. These features include dynamic stability and security in public goods mechanisms, tra...

The setup is similar to that of a Bayesian game. The ingredients are: 1. denote a typical type of player i. (q (m) , t (m)). All of these are to be chosen by the mechanism designer. We call the pair Γ = (M, φ) a mechanism. We will consider dominant strategy equilibria in these Bayesian games as well as Bayesian Nash equilibria. Whichever solution concept we adopt, we call φ (m) = (q (m) , t (m)...

Computational mechanism design brings together the concern in microeconomics with decision making in the context of distributed private information and self-interest and the concern in computer science with computational and communication complexity. In constructing mechanisms, with application to the design of electronic markets and to protocols for automated negotiation, many new issues arise...