[Intelligence Seminar] January 28, 3:30pm: , Presentation by David Sarne

[Dana Houston]

> INTELLIGENCE SEMINAR
> JANUARY 28 AT 3:30PM, IN GCH 6115
>
> SPEAKER: DAVID SARNE (Bar-Ilan University)
> Host: Ariel Procaccia
> For meetings, contact Pat Loring (sawako at cs.cmu.edu 
> <mailto:sawako at cs.cmu.edu>)
>
> UNKNOWING MORE - THE DOWNSIDE OF INFORMATION IN MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS
>
> In many multi-agent systems we find information brokers or information 
> technologies aiming to provide the agents with more information or 
> reduce the cost of acquiring new information. In this talk I will show 
> that better information can hurt: the presence of an information 
> provider, even if the use of her services is optional, can degrade 
> both individual agents' utilities and overall social welfare. The talk 
> will focus on two specific domains: auctions (where the provided 
> information relates to the common value of the auctioned item) and 
> cooperative information gathering (where costly information is shared 
> between the agents). For the first, I'll show that with the 
> information provider in the market, in conflict with classic auction 
> theory, the auctioneer may prefer to limit the number of bidders that 
> participate in the auction and similarly bidders may prefer to have 
> greater competition. Also, bidders' unawareness of the auctioneer's 
> option to purchase the information does not necessarily play into the 
> hands of the auctioneer and, similarly, bidders may sometimes benefit 
> from not knowing that the auctioneer has the option to purchase such 
> information. For cooperative information gathering I'll present three 
> methods for improving overall and individual performance, all based on 
> limiting and constraining information sharing. Along the talk we will 
> also answer questions such as: why bars use dim lights and loud music; 
> ways that charities could benefit from group buying; and why it makes 
> sense to pay someone to over-price information she wants to sell you.
>
> BIO
>
> David Sarne is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science 
> at Bar-Ilan University. He is also the head of the Intelligent 
> Information Agents (IIA) group. He joined Bar-Ilan in Oct. 2007; 
> before this he was a Post-Doc at Harvard University for two years, 
> following several years in the Israeli hi-tech industry. He holds a 
> B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and an M.Sc. in Information Systems 
> (both from Tel-Aviv University) and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from 
> Bar-Ilan University.
> -- 

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