An auction is combinatorial when bidders can place bids on combinations of items, called “packages,” rather than just individual items. Computer scientists are interested in combinatorial auctions because they are concerned with the expressiveness of bidding languages, as well as the...

We present two simple search methods for computing a sample Nash equilibrium in a normal-form game: one for 2-player games and one for n-player games. Both algorithms bias the search towards supports that are small and balanced, and employ a backtracking procedure to efficiently explore these...

We construct a budget-balanced wagering mechanism that flexibly extracts information about event probabilities, as well as the mean, median, and other statistics from a group of individuals whose beliefs are immutable to the actions of others. We show how our mechanism, called the Brier betting...

We consider a single indivisible object auctioned in an ascending bid English auction. Two variations of this auction are compared with respect to the seller's revenue. In the first mechanism the participants observe the identity of a bidder that drops from the auction while in the second...

We revisit classic algorithmic search and optimization problems from the perspective of competition. Rather than a single optimizer minimizing expected cost, we consider a zero-sum game in which an optimization problem is presented to two players, whose only goal is to outperform the opponent....