TCS+ talk: Wednesday, November 20, Divyarthi Mohan, Boston University
Clement Canonne
Our next talk will take place this coming Wednesday, November 20th at 1:00 PM Eastern Time (10:00 AM Pacific Time, 19:00 Central European Time, 18:00 UTC). Divyarthi Mohan from Boston University will speak about "Optimal Stopping with Interdependent Values" (abstract below).
Please sign up on the online form at https://sites.google.com/view/tcsplus/welcome/next-tcs-talk if you wish to join the talk as an individual or a group. Registration is /not/ required to attend the interactive talk, and the link will be posted on the website the day prior to the talk; however, by registering in the form, you will receive a reminder, along with the link. (The link to the recording will also be posted on our website afterwards.)
Hoping to see you all there,
The organizers
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Speaker: Divyarthi Mohan (Boston University)
Title: Optimal Stopping with Interdependent Values
Abstract: We study online selection problems in both the prophet and secretary settings, when arriving agents have interdependent values. In the interdependent values model, introduced in the seminal work of Milgrom and Weber [1982], each agent has a private signal and the value of an agent is a function of the signals held by all agents. Results in online selection crucially rely on some degree of independence of values, which is conceptually at odds with the interdependent values model. For prophet and secretary models under the standard independent values assumption, prior works provide constant factor approximations to the welfare. On the other hand, when agents have interdependent values, prior works in Economics and Computer Science provide truthful mechanisms that obtain optimal and approximately optimal welfare under certain assumptions on the valuation functions. We bring together these two important lines of work and provide the first constant factor approximations for prophet and secretary problems with interdependent values. We consider both the algorithmic setting, where agents are non-strategic (but have interdependent values), and the mechanism design setting with strategic agents. All our results are constructive and use simple stopping rules.
Joint work with Simon Mauras and Rebecca Reiffenhäuser.
Bio: Divyarthi Mohan is a postdoctoral researcher at Boston University hosted by Prof. Kira Goldner. Previously, she was a postdoc at Tel Aviv University with Prof. Michal Feldman. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science at Princeton University in July 2021 advised by Prof. Matt Weinberg. Divya's research interest broadly lies at the intersection of computer science and economics, with a focus on algorithmic mechanism design, social learning and strategic communication. She was awarded the class of 2021 Siebel Scholarship and the Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship for Fall 2022.