Computer science tackles 30-year-old economics problem
In 2007, the University of Chicago's Roger Myerson won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences — in part for research he had published, in 1981, on auction design. Using the tools of game theory, Myerson showed how to structure an auction for a single item such that if all the bidders adopted the bidding strategies in their best interest, the auctioneer would realize the greatest profit.Myerson's work immediately raised a related question: What's the best way to organize an auction in which bidders are competing for multiple items? That question has stood for 30 years, but MIT computer scientists believe that they have now answered it. In a pair of recent papers, Constantinos Daskalakis, the X-Window Consortium Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT, and his students Yang Cai and Matthew Weinberg describe an algorithm for...