| Title: | The public project problem |
| Date: |
November 14, 2008 (Friday)
|
| Time: |
2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
|
| Venue: |
Room 121, 1/F, Ho Sin-hang Engineering Building,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T. |
| Speaker: |
Professor Krzysztof R. Apt
CWI Fellow, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Professor of Computer Science, the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation University of Amsterdam The Netherlands |
In the public project problem a decision must be made whether to construct a discrete public good (say a bridge) without knowledge of the utility functions of the interested players. This is a well-known example of a mechanism design problem. The classic pivotal mechanism provides a solution but, unavoidably, at the cost of taxes players have to pay. We explain that this solution is optimal, ..., well, sometimes. Additionally, when the players are allowed to move sequentially, a better solution turns out to be optimal.
The lecture will start with a short introduction to the mechanism design, the subject of the most recent Nobel prize in Economics. (Based on recent works with V. Conitzer, A. Estevez-Fernandez, V. Markakis and M. Guo).
BIOGRAPHY:
Krzysztof R. Apt got a PhD in mathematical logic from the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, in 1974.
He is a CWI Fellow at CWI, Amsterdam and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In the past he also worked at the Universities and Research Centre in Poland, France, U.S., Belgium and Singapore.
Apt published four books and fifty journal articles, mostly dealing with his research on program verification and semantics, logic programming and constraint programming. His current research is concerned with game theory and multi-agent systems.
He is the founder and first editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions in Computational Logic. Apt is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Computing Research Repository (CoRR). He strongly believes that free access to scientific publishing is both feasible and strongly desirable for the further advancement of science.
Enquiries: Miss Temmy So at tel 2609 8444
For more information, please refer to http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/seminar