SYSEN 5690

Information Design for Strategic Decision-Making

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2024-2025.

The course covers the basic models and solution approaches in problems that involve interactions among strategic agents distilling the key results in mechanism design theory. Over the last seventy years, the theory of mechanism design was developed as an approach to efficiently align the individuals' and system's interests in problems where individuals have private preferences. It can be viewed as the art of designing information and protocols to achieve a desired outcome. Mechanism design has broad applications spanning many fields, including transportation routing, smart grid, communication networks, social media, online advertising, and resource allocation problems. The objective of this course is to gain a sound understanding of the science behind the use of mechanism design in solving modern problems that involve strategic interactions among agents. The course will provide a unified treatment of the subject, suitable for a broad engineering audience.

When Offered Fall.

Comments Knowledge of probability, especially conditional distributions and expectations, linear algebra, linear programming, mathematical analysis, and computational complexity will be helpful, although these prerequisites will not be strictly enforced.

• Formulate a mechanism design problem, identify the set of outcomes, and define the social choice function.
• Identify whether a direct or indirect mechanism is appropriate to use for a given problem.
• Implement a social choice function using different solution concepts, e.g., dominant strategy implementation, Bayesian Nash implementation, etc.
• Solve resource allocation problems using mechanism design.

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