Dengji Zhao

Dengji Zhao Assistant Professor at ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China

Title: Diffusion Mechanism Design

Abstract: The literature of mechanism design has traditionally assumed that the set of participants are fixed and are known to the mechanism (i.e. the market owner) in advance. However, in practice the market owner can only directly reach a very small number of people. In order to get more participants, the market owner often needs very costly promotions via, e.g., Google, Facebook or Twitter, but the impact of promotions is often unpredictable. To solve this dilemma, we build the promotion inside the market mechanism and the promotion guarantees that market owner will never lose. This is achieved by incentivising people who are aware of the market to further diffuse the information to their (geographical or social network based) neighbors. The participants will be rewarded if their diffusion effort is beneficial to the market owner. We call this Diffusion Mechanism Design.

Biography: Dengji Zhao is an Assistant Professor at ShanghaiTech University. He received double Ph.D. (2012) degrees in Computer Science from University of Western Sydney and University of Toulouse 1 Capitole, and received double M.Sc. (2009) degrees in Computational Logic from Technische Universität Dresden and Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. He got a B.Sc. (2006) degree in Computer Science from Macau University of Science and Technology. Before joining ShanghaiTech, he was a postdoc (2013-2014) with Prof. Makoto Yokoo (the first AAAI Fellow in Asia) and a research fellow (2014-2016) with Prof. Nick Jennings (the first Regius Professor of Computer Science, UK).