Takayuki Osogami, IBM Research

Abstract

We study the problem of designing mechanisms for trading networks that satisfy four desired properties: dominant-strategy incentive compatibility, efficiency, weak budget balance (WBB), and individual rationality (IR). Although there exist mechanisms that simultaneously satisfy these properties ex post for combinatorial auctions, we prove the impossibility that such mechanisms do not exist for a broad class of trading networks. We thus propose approaches for computing and learning the mechanisms that satisfy the four properties, in a Bayesian setting, where WBB and IR, respectively, are relaxed to ex ante and interim. For computational and sample efficiency, we introduce several techniques, including game theoretical analysis to reduce the input feature space. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed approaches successfully find the mechanisms with the four properties for those trading networks where the impossibility holds ex post.

[Presentation video]

Speaker Bio: Takayuki Osogami is a senior technical staff member and the manager of the mathematical sciences group at IBM Research - Tokyo.  He is currently leading global research projects on reinforcement learning, industrial applications of reinforcement learning, automation of decision optimization with reinforcement learning,  multi-agent reinforcement learning, and integration of learning and game theory.  He was a group leader of a governmental project supported by Core Research for Evolutionary Science and Technology, Japan Science and Technology Agency during 2013-2019, where his group developed and applied  theory of sequential decision making, human behavior modeling, and neuromorphic computing.  He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in August 2005, and a B.Eng. degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1998.  He was selected as one of the Researchers with Nice Step 2020 by the National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP) of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.