Krishnamurthy Iyer
Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE), Cornell University
The last two decades have seen the rise of a number of online markets and service systems, ranging from auction markets for online advertising to platform markets for peer-to-peer transportation, freelance labor and shared housing. In such systems, the agents' behavior is often the result of the incentive structure induced by the design of the system. Consequently, quantifying how participants act is an important step in the analysis of the system performance and in the evaluation of different system designs.

Game theory provides a standard set of tools to analyze the outcome of an interaction among a group of agents. In this tutorial, we will briefly introduce the basic game theoretic concepts, and study their applications in the design and analysis of markets and service systems. Specifically, we will focus on stochastic/queueing models and study the impact of various controls: pricing, scheduling and information sharing.

Topics

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This tutorial will be delivered in two sessions, each 1.5 hours long.

1. Background
   1. Games of incomplete information
   2. Bayesian Nash equilibrium
   3. Applications to first price/second price auctions
2. Basics of Mechanism Design
   1. Revelation principle
   2. Myerson optimal auction
3. Applications in OR/OM
   1. Stochastic/queueing models for service systems
   2. Pricing/Scheduling policies in queueing systems
   3. Information design in queueing systems