Revenue-optimal Auctions

 In his seminal paper, Myerson [1981] provides a revenue-optimal auction for a seller who is looking to sell a single item to multiple bidders. Unfortunately, Myerson's auction generalizes to a limited range of domains, called "single-parameter", where each bidder's preference over the auction’s outcomes is specified by a single parameter. Indeed, extending this auction to "multi-parameter domains", such as selling multiple heterogeneous items to bidders, has been one of the most central problems in Mathematical Economics. We solve this problem.

Bio: Constantinos (or Costis) Daskalakis is an Assistant Professor of EECS at MIT. He completed his undergraduate studies in Greece, at the National Technical University of Athens, and obtained a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. After Berkeley he was a postdoctoral researcher in Microsoft Research New England, and since 2009 he has been at the faculty of MIT. His research interests lie in Algorithmic Game Theory and Applied Probability, in particular computational aspects of markets and the Internet, social networks, and computational problems in Biology. Costis has been honored with a 2007 Microsoft Graduate Research Fellowship, the 2008 Game Theory and Computer Science Prize from the Game Theory Society, the 2008 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, a NSF Career Award, a 2010 Sloan Foundation Fellowship in Computer Science, the 2011 SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize, and the MIT Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Distinguished Teaching.