Electronic Commerce: From Economic and Game Theoretic
Models to Working Protocols
Moshe Tennenholtz
Technion
Israel Institute of Technology
Abstract
The design of protocols for non-cooperative computational
environments (e.g. Internet Auctions) is a major challenge for
electronic commerce. In order to address this challenge we should
tackle several complementary tasks: 1. Re-consider economic mechanisms in
view of their use in computational settings. 2. Incorporate
distributed systems features into the context of game-theoretic and
economic models. 3. Deal with computational aspects of mechanism
design. In this talk we present a (biased) overview of some of the
work carried out on these tasks. In particular, we will consider the
effects of having many participants, risk elements, and competition
among sellers in the Internet setup, on the study of auctions. In
addition, we consider the effects of the communication network and the
asynchronous nature of distributed systems on the implementation and
analysis of various economic mechanisms. Some results about the
computational treatment of economic mechanisms will be mentioned as
well.
About the Speaker
Moshe Tennenholtz received his B.Sc. in Mathematics
from Tel-Aviv University (1986), and his M.Sc. and Ph.D (1987,1991)
from the department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science in
Weizmann Institute. He spent one year as a post-doctoral research
affiliate, and one year as a research associate at the Robotics
Laboratory of the Computer Science Department at Stanford
University. In 1993 he joined the faculty of industrial engineering
and management at the Technion-- Israel Institute of Technology. His
work is concerned with the foundations of multi-agent systems. In
particular, in joint work with colleagues and students he introduced
and developed theories of artificial social systems, co-learning, and
qualitative decision-making. His recent line of research is
concerned with the adaptation of economic models to computerized/AI settings.
bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu
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Tue Sep 21 18:59:46 PDT 1999