The Internet, with its varying degrees of collaboration and competition, has become the de facto platform for large scale distributed computing. This has motivated a great deal of research into the design of protocols for resource allocation and electronic commerce among parties with diverse and selfish interests. The investigators continue this line of research, focusing on the study of mechanism design, also known as incentive engineering. A mechanism is a protocol (or algorithm) that is explicitly designed so that rational participants, motivated solely by their self-interest, end up achieving the designer's goals. Research into mechanism design for private value optimization problems is fundamental to the design and effective functioning of systems, such as networks and peer-to-peer systems, systems based on software agents (as studied in artificial intelligence), and systems for data mining and electronic commerce. The major intellectual challenges being undertaken include: (1) the design and analysis of new, more effective and efficiently implementable techniques for profit maximization in mechanism design, especially in online and repeated settings; (2) the development of a theory of profit benchmarks; (3) the design and analysis of profit-maximizing pricing schemes; (4) the development and study of alternative solution concepts and appropriate corresponding analysis frameworks; (5) the incorporation of new aspects of utility into the study of mechanism design; (6) the exploration of new design and analysis techniques in repeated games such as the use of low internal regret strategies to achieve approximate correlated equilibria; (7) the development of a theory of reputation; and (8) the theoretical and empirical study of other practical problems with interesting incentive structures, including ad auctions, routing, and backoff in wireless networks.
