The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

Robust mechanism design is a rising alternative to Bayesian mechanism design, which yields designs that do not rely on assumptions like full distributional knowledge. We apply this approach to mechanisms for selling a single item, assuming that only the mean and range of the distribution of buyer values is known. We seek the mechanism that maximizes revenue over the worst-case distribution compatible with the known parameters. Such a mechanism arises as an equilibrium of a zero-sum game between the seller and an adversary who chooses the distribution, and so can be referred to as the max-min mechanism.