Ron Lavi

Senior Lecturer
Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management
The Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology
Israel
E-mail: ronlavi@ie.technion.ac.il
Office: Bloomfield 302
Phone: 04-8294410
Research Interests
I'm working on subjects on the
border
of Computer Science, Game Theory, and Economics.
I study models that integrate computational and algorithmic theory with
game theory and microeconomic
theory. Some representative questions that my research explores are:
(i) What are the limits of ex-post
implementability in private value settings. (ii) What other solution
concepts can we successfully use in
a distribution free analysis? (iii) What types of dynamic and detail
free mechanisms can we construct?
The motivation for these questions arise from Auction Theory, a
research area with theoretical as well
as practical relevance. Here
is a more detailed research statement.
Short Bibliography
I
have a PhD in Computer Science from the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
After graduating, I did a post-doc
at Caltech's
Social and Information Sciences
Laboratory (SISL).
I joined the Technion in August 2006. Here
is
a full CV,
and, on the
informal side, some pictures.
Courses
Auction
Theory (96573)
Auction
Theory for MBA (98753)
Introduction
to Financial Management (94564)
Students
Liri Finkelstein
Alex Bogautov
Avinoam Marom
Ira Shein
Students that are interested in doing research on the above mentioned
subjects are welcomed to apply.
Especially talented students may get extra funding on top of the
Technion's funding.
Recent Working Papers
Position
Auctions with Budgets: Existence and Uniqueness
By Itai Ashlagi, Mark Braverman, Avinatan Hassidim, Ron Lavi, and Moshe
Tennenholtz
Efficiency
Levels in Sequential Auctions with Dynamic Arrivals
By Ron Lavi and Ella Segev
PowerPoint
Presentation
An
Optimal Lower Bound for Anonymous Scheduling
By Itai Ashlagi, Shahar Dobzinski, and Ron lavi
(preliminary version in ACM-EC'09)
PowerPoint
Presentation
Multi-unit
Auctions with Budget Limits
By Shahar Dobzinski, Ron Lavi, and Noam Nisan
(preliminary version in FOCS'08)
Journal Publications
Truthful
Mechanism Design for Multi-Dimensional Scheduling via Cycle Monotonicity
By Ron Lavi and Chaitanya Swamy
Games and Economic Behavior, to
appear.
PowerPoint
Presentation
Two
Simplified Proofs for Roberts' Theorem
By Ron Lavi, Ahuva Mu'alem, and Noam Nisan
Social Choice and Welfare, 32,
pp. 407 -- 423, 2009.
Single
Value Combinatorial Auctions and Implementation in Undominated
Strategies
By Moshe Babaioff, Ron Lavi, and Elan Pavlov
Journal
of the ACM, 56(1), pp. 4:1 -- 4:32, 2009.
PowerPoint
Presentation
Weak
Monotonicity characterizes deterministic dominant strategy
implementation
by S. Bikhchandani, S. Chatterji, R. Lavi, A. Mu'alem, N.
Nisan, and A. Sen
Econometrica, 74(4),
pp. 1109 -- 1132, 2006.
See also the supplementary
material for this paper.
Competitive
Analysis of Incentive Compatible On-Line Auctions
by Ron Lavi and Noam Nisan
Theoretical
Computer Science 310(1), pp. 159-180, 2004.
PowerPoint
Presentation
Book Chapters and Review Papers
Mechanism
Design
By Ron Lavi
Encyclopedia of
Complexity and System Science, Springer, 2009
Algorithmic
Mechanism Design
By Ron Lavi
Encyclopedia of Algorithms, Springer,
2008
Computationally-Efficient
Approximation
Mechanisms
By Ron Lavi
Algorithmic Game Theory,
Cambridge University Press, 2007
Searching
for the Possibility – Impossibility
Border of Truthful Mechanism Design
By Ron Lavi
ACM SIGecom Exchanges 7(1), 2007
Publications in Refereed Conferences
An
Optimal Lower Bound for Anonymous Scheduling
By Itai Ashlagi, Shahar Dobzinski, and Ron Lavi
Proceedings
of the 10th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'09), 2009
Multi-unit
Auctions with Budget Limits
By Shahar Dobzinski, Ron Lavi, and Noam Nisan
Proceedings of the 49th Annual IEEE
Symposium on
Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS'08), 2008
Truthful
Mechanism Design for Multi-Dimensional Scheduling via Cycle Monotonicity
By Ron Lavi and
Chaitanya Swamy
Proceedings of
the 8th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'07), 2007
Impersonation-Based
Mechanisms
By Moshe Babaioff, Ron Lavi,
and Elan Pavlov
Proceedings
of the 21st National Conference on Artificial
Intelligence (AAAI'06), 2006
Single
Value Combinatorial Auctions and Implementation in Undominated
Strategies
By Moshe Babaioff, Ron Lavi, and Elan Pavlov
Proceedings of the 17th
ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA'06), 2006
Truthful
and Near-optimal Mechanism Design via Linear Programming
By Ron Lavi and Chaitanya Swamy
Proceedings of the 46th
Annual IEEE Symposium on
Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS'05), 2005
PowerPoint
Presentation
Mechanism
Design for Single-Value Domains
By Moshe Babaioff, Ron Lavi, and Elan Pavlov
Proceedings
of the 20th National Conference on Artificial
Intelligence (AAAI'05), 2005
Online
Ascending Auctions for Gradually Expiring Items
By Ron Lavi and Noam Nisan
Proceedings of the 17th
ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA'05), 2005
PowerPoint
Presentation and a
more detailed version of the paper.
Online
competitive algorithms for maximizing weighted throughput of unit jobs
By Y. Bartal, F.Y.L. Chin, M. Chrobak, S.P.Y. Fung, W. Jawor, R. Lavi,
J. Sgall,
T. Tichy
Proceedings of
the 21st
Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS'04), 2004
Towards
a Characterization of Truthful Combinatorial Auctions
By Ron Lavi, Ahuva Mu'alem, and Noam Nisan
Proceedings of the 44th
Annual IEEE Symposium on
Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS'03), 2003
PowerPoint
Presentation and a
more detailed version of the paper.
Competitive
Analysis of Incentive Compatible On-Line Auctions
By Ron Lavi and Noam Nisan
Proceedings of the 2nd
ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'00), 2000
The Home
Model
and Competitive Algorithms for Load Balancing in
a Computing Cluster
By Ron Lavi and Amnon Barak
Proceedings of the 21st
International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'01),
2001
Improving
the PVM Daemon Network Performance by Direct Network Access
By Ron Lavi and Amnon Barak.
Proceedings of the 5th EuroPVM/MPI'98,
LNCS 1497, pp. 44-51, Springer-Verlag, 1998.
Theses
Ph.D. thesis:
Auction Theory in Computational Settings , August 2004.
M.Sc. thesis: The
Home Model for Load Balancing in a Computing Cluster , October
1999.