Machine Learning in Automated Mechanism Design for Pricing and Auctions

Mechanism design is a field of game theory with tremendous real-world impact, encompassing areas such as pricing and auction design. A powerful approach in this field is automated mechanism design, which uses machine learning and optimization to design mechanisms based on data. This automated approach helps overcome challenges faced by traditional, manual approaches to mechanism design, which have been stuck for decades due to inherent computational complexity challenges: the revenue-maximizing mechanism is not known even for just two items for sale! In this tutorial, we cover the rapidly growing area of automated mechanism design for revenue maximization. This encompasses both the foundations of batch and online learning (including statistical guarantees and optimization procedures), as well as real-world success stories.

URL: https://sites.google.com/view/amdtutorial