EconCS Survey Seminar Series

Algorithmic Information Structure Design in Games

There has been a surge of interest in the role the information structure of a game --- i.e. who knows what --- plays in determining the game's equilibrium and players' payoffs. Underlying much of this economic literature is an optimization question faced by the mechanism designer: which information structure leads to "optimal" equilibria, and can it be implemented via a simple (efficient) algorithm? This task is sometimes known as "signaling" or "persuasion". I will survey recent work in both economics and computer science examining structural and computational aspects of this question, and I will highlight recent progress and open questions.