CS 298-2
Theory Seminar

Prof. Silvio Micali
MIT

Universal Mechanism Design

Monday, September 12, 2005
4pm-5pm
306 Soda Hall


Mechanism design applies to many contexts, including allocations of
private goods, provision of public goods, design of markets, voting
procedures, social planning etc. Mechanism design problems, however, are
typically solved individually, each time with much ingenuity.

We exhibit an automatic, polynomial-time procedure that, given ANY
mechanism design problem, finds a solution, if one exists.

Key to our result is proving that the ballot-box, the device used all
over the world for privately and correctly computing the tally function, can
actually be used to compute ANY function with unusually strong security
properties.

Joint work with Sergei Izmalkov and Matt Lepinski