Implementing the “Wisdom of the Crowd”

We study a novel model in which agents arrive sequentially one after the other and each in turn chooses one action from a fixed set of actions to maximize his expected rewards given the information he possesses at the time of arrival. The information that becomes available affects the incentives of an agent to explore and generate new information. We characterize the optimal disclosure policy of a planner whose goal is to maximizes social welfare. The planner’s optimal policy is characterized and shown to be intuitive and very simple to implement. As the number of agents increases the social welfare converges to the optimal welfare of the unconstrained mechanism. One interpretation for our result is the implementation of what is known as the ‘Wisdom of the crowds’. This topic has become more relevant during the last decade with the rapid adaptation of the Internet. This is a joint work with Ilan Kremer and Motty Perry.

发言人详细信息

Professor Yishay Mansour got his PhD from MIT in 1990, following that he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and a Research Staff Member in IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Since 1992 he is at Tel-Aviv University, where he is currently a Professor of Computer Science and has served as the first head of the School of Computer Science during 2000-2002. Prof. Mansour has a part-time position at Microsoft Research in Israel, and has held visiting positions with Bell Labs, AT&T research Labs, IBM Research, and Google Research. He has mentored start-ups as Riverhead, which was acquired by Cisco, Ghoonet and Verix. Prof. Mansour has published over 50 journal papers and over 100 proceeding papers in various areas of computer science with special emphasis on communication networks, machine learning, and algorithmic game theory, and has supervised over a dozen graduate students in those areas. He is currently the director of the Israeli Center of Research Excellence in Algorithms. Prof. Mansour is currently an associate editor in a number of distinguished journals and has been on numerous conference program committees. He was both the program chair of COLT (1998) and served on the COLT steering committee. A more detailed CV is found in: http://www.tau.ac.il/~mansour/CV_Yishay_Mansour.htm

日期：
演讲者：
Yishay Mansour
所属机构：
Tel Aviv University