Speaker: 冯逸丁助理教授，香港科技大学

Inviter: 陈旭瑾研究员

Title: Beyond Regularity: Simple versus Optimal Mechanisms, Revisited

Language: English&Chinese

Time & Venue: 2024.12.25 14:30-15:30 数学院南楼613

Abstract: A large proportion of the Bayesian mechanism design literature is restricted to the family of **regular** distributions or the family of **monotone hazard rate (MHR)** distributions, which overshadows this beautiful and well-developed theory. We (re-)introduce two generalizations, the family of **quasi-regular** distributions and the family of **quasi-MHR** distributions. All four families together form a hierarchy. The significance of our new families is manifold. First, their defining conditions are immediate relaxations of the regularity/MHR conditions (i.e., monotonicity of the virtual value functions and/or the hazard rate functions), which reflect economic intuition. Second, they satisfy natural mathematical properties (about order statistics) that both original families violate. Third but foremost, numerous results established before for regular/MHR distributions now can be generalized, with or even without quantitative losses.This talk is based on the joint work with Yaonan Jin (Huawei TCS Lab).