Computationally Efficient Techniques for Economic Mechanisms

My Ph.D. thesis is focused on the field of mechanism design, a branch of game theory that aims to study interaction mechanisms for rational agents. The basic goal is the design of direct-revelation mechanisms that are stable. Given the valuations reported by the agents, a mechanism determines the outcome of the interaction by means of an objective function. In some contexts, such objective function cannot lead to a stable mechanism or finding an optimal solution is N P-hard. The goal of my studies is the development of techniques to deal with these situations. The basic idea is to design a new objective function that approximates at best the original one, but, at the same time can be used to build a stable mechanism computable in polynomial time. During my Ph.D., I will extend the techniques currently available in the state of the art to more general situations and I will apply such techniques to the important field of ad auctions.