Talks, Tutorials, Truthfulness

Jon Feldman and I will be giving a tutorial at EC 2009 on Sponsored Search. But we promise not to rehash auctions. In fact, tutorial will focus on an advertiser point of view, so more optimization than auctions. We are also running an ad campaign to collect stats:

EC 2009 Tutorial Feldman, Muthukrishnan: Information Exchange in Sponsored Search. www.sigecom.org/ec09/..

There are at least two forthcoming talks of great interest, but you have to choose one: Susan Athey will speak at EC09 on Wed, July 8, at Palo Alto, CA. On Thurs, July 9th, Noam Nisan will speak at ICALP09 at Rhodes, Greece.

Finally, truthfulness. Can we design a truthful mechanism for budget-constrained bidders in a series of ad auctions? If you wanted to maximize the number of clicks, in some cases one can design such a mechanism [FMNP SAGT08]. If you want to maximize profit, such mechanisms can not produce Pareto-optimality [DLN FOCS08], but in a forthcoming paper at Ad Auctions Workshop, Ravi, Hafalir and Sayedi show a very nice, simple semi-truthful mechanism that is also Pareto optimal.