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Tutorial on Mechanism Design

Mechanism design is the branch of game theory that deals with the problem of optimization over inputs owned by selfish agents, whose interests don't necessarily align with those of the optimizer. The goal is to design a game to be played by the selfish agents, such that the equilibria of this game correspond to (exact or approximate) maximizers/minimizers of the objective function. We will discuss questions such as what is the class of optimization functions for which such games exist, what do such games look like, and when can we compute them in polynomial time. No knowledge of game theory is necessary. [an error occurred while processing this directive]