Ruggiero Cavallo - research

Broadly, my work is geared towards the design of mechanisms for group decision-making that achieve desirable system-level objectives even when individuals pursue only their own self-interest -- for instance, coordinating and incentivizing a group of selfish agents to compute and implement a decision policy that maximizes social reward. My dissertation focused on 1) dynamic mechanism design: engineering solutions for sequential decision-making environments, where both the computational challenges of determining optimal policies and the incentive challenges of implementing them in equilibrium are significant, and 2) redistribution mechanisms, which improve on the social welfare properties of classic solutions via the artful return of "revenue" to participants in a mechanism.

-|-   Social Welfare Maximization in Dynamic Strategic Decision Problems. Ruggiero Cavallo. Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, May, 2008. link

-|-   Efficiency and Redistribution in Dynamic Mechanism Design. Ruggiero Cavallo. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Electronic Commerce (EC '08), 2008. pdf

-|-   Efficient Metadeliberation Auctions. Ruggiero Cavallo and David C. Parkes. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-08), 2008. pdf

-|-   Efficient Online Mechanisms for Persistent, Periodically Inaccessible Self-Interested Agents. Ruggiero Cavallo, David C. Parkes, and Satinder Singh. Working paper, 2007. pdf

-|-   Handling Self-Interest in Groups, with Minimal Cost. Ruggiero Cavallo. In Proc. of the 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06), Nectar paper track, Boston, MA, 2006. pdf

-|-   Optimal Coordinated Planning Amongst Self-Interested Agents with Private State. Ruggiero Cavallo, David C. Parkes, and Satinder Singh. In Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI'2006), pages 55-62, Cambridge, MA, 2006. pdf

-|-   Optimal Coordination of Loosely-Coupled Self-Interested Robots. Ruggiero Cavallo, David C. Parkes, and Satinder Singh. In the Workshop on Auction Mechanisms for Robot Coordination, AAAI-06, Boston, MA, 2006. pdf

-|-   Optimal Decision-Making With Minimal Waste: Strategyproof Redistribution of VCG Payments. Ruggiero Cavallo. In the Proc. of the 5th Int. Joint Conf. on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems (AAMAS'06), Hakodate, Japan, 2006. pdf    Nominated for the best student paper award.
[ This version includes minor corrections and an appendix that did not appear in the original published version. ]

-|-   TBBL: A Tree-Based Bidding Language for Iterative Combinatorial Exchanges. Ruggiero Cavallo, David C. Parkes, Adam Juda, Adam Kirsch, Alex Kulesza, Sebastien Lahaie, Benjamin Lubin, Loizos Michael, and Jeffrey Shneidman. IJCAI-05 Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2005. pdf

-|-   ICE: An Iterative Combinatorial Exchange. David C. Parkes, Ruggiero Cavallo, Nick Elprin, Adam Juda, Sebastien Lahaie, Benjamin Lubin, Loizos Michael, Jeffrey Shneidman, and Hassan Sultan. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Electronic Commerce (EC '05), pages 249-258. ACM Press, 2005. pdf

Postdoc advisor: Michael Kearns            My homepage            Short resume

PhD advisor: David Parkes            Old research group: econcs

Selected publications: