Hariri Institute Distinguished Lecture - Ben Lubin

Combinatorial Auctions have found application in many areas, from supply chain management to the high-value government bandwidth auctions that have been widely publicized. However, their two-sided generalization, Combinatorial Exchanges, have not been widely adopted. One reason for this is the difficulty of designing good payment rules for combinatorial mechanisms in general, and CEs in particular. In this talk I will motivate this payment-design task by describing several combinatorial mechanisms for use in important domains such as computational resource allocation. Next a framework for formalizing the payment design problem will be described, and several existing payment rules from the literature will be situated within the framework. Finally, a novel computational approach to defining optimal payment rules with respect to the design framework will be presented. After receiving his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Harvard in 1999, Dr. Lubin took a research and development position at BBN Technologies, working on advanced multi-agent modeling, scheduling and logistics systems. After six years in industry, he returned to Harvard to pursue a Ph.D. at the intersection of computer science, game theory and economics. His research has focused on combinatorial exchanges, mechanisms that support efficient reallocation of goods when participants have complex preferences regarding bundles of items. Dr. Lubin is a recipient of the Siebel fellowship and a Yahoo! KTC award.