Gabriele Farina

Operation Frames and Clubs in Kidney Exchange.

A kidney exchange is a centrally-administered barter market where patients swap their willing yet incompatible donors. Modern kidney exchanges use 2-cycles, 3-cycles, and chains initiated by non-directed donors (altruists who are willing to give a kidney to anyone) as the means for swapping. We propose significant generalizations to kidney exchange. We allow more than one donor to donate in exchange for their desired patient receiving a kidney. We also allow for the possibility of a donor willing to donate if any of a number of patients receive kidneys. Furthermore, we combine these notions and generalize them. The generalization is to exchange among organ clubs, where a club is willing to donate organs outside the club if and only if the club receives organs from outside the club according to given specifications. We prove that unlike in the standard model, the uncapped clearing problem is NP-complete. We also present the notion of operation frames that can be used to sequence the operations across batches, and present integer programming formulations for the market clearing problems for these new types of organ exchanges. Experiments show that in the single-donation setting, operation frames improve planning by 34%--51%. Allowing up to two donors to donate in exchange for one kidney donated to their designated patient yields a further increase in social welfare.

Adopting the Cascade Model in Ad Auctions: Efficiency Bounds and Truthful Algorithmic Mechanisms

Sponsored Search Auctions (SSAs) are one of the most successful applications of microeconomic mechanisms, with a revenue of about

Smoothing Method for Approximate Extensive-Form Perfect Equilibrium

72 billion in the US alone in 2016. However, the problem of designing the best economic mechanism for sponsored search auctions is far from being solved, and, given the amount at stake, it is no surprise that it has received growing attention over the past few years. The most common auction mechanism for SSAs is the Generalized Second Price (GSP). However, the GSP is known not to be truthful: the agents participating in the auction might have an incentive to report false values, generating economic inefficiency and suboptimal revenues in turn. Superior, efficient truthful mechanisms, such as the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction, are well known in the literature. However, while the VCG auction is currently adopted for the strictly related scenario of contextual advertising, e.g., by Google and Facebook, companies are reluctant to extend it to SSAs, fearing prohibitive switching costs. Other than truthfulness, two issues are of paramount importance in designing effective SSAs. First, the choice of the user model; not only does an accurate user model better target ads to users, it also is a critical factor in reducing the inefficiency of the mechanism. Often an antagonist to this, the second issue is the running time of the mechanism, given the performance pressure these mechanisms undertake in real-world applications. In our work, we argue in favor of adopting the VCG mechanism based on the cascade model with ad/position externalities (APDC-VCG). Our study includes both the derivation of inefficiency bounds and the design and the experimental evaluation of exact and approximate algorithms.

Three Uses of the Online Social Programming Training System: On Nature and Purpose of Spreading Algorithmic Problem Solving

Nash equilibrium is a popular solution concept for solving imperfect-information games in practice. However, it has a major drawback: it does not preclude suboptimal play in branches of the game tree that are not reached in equilibrium. Equilibrium refinements can mend this issue, but have experienced little practical adoption. This is largely due to a lack of scalable algorithms. Sparse iterative methods, in particular first-order methods, are known to be among the most effective algorithms for computing Nash equilibria in large-scale two-player zero-sum extensive-form games. In this paper, we provide, to our knowledge, the first extension of these methods to equilibrium refinements. We develop a smoothing approach for behavioral perturbations of the convex polytope that encompasses the strategy spaces of players in an extensive-form game. This enables one to compute an approximate variant of extensive-form perfect equilibria. Experiments show that our smoothing approach leads to solutions with dramatically stronger strategies at information sets that are reached with low probability in approximate Nash equilibria, while retaining the overall convergence rate associated with fast algorithms for Nash equilibrium. This has benefits both in approximate equilibrium finding (such approximation is necessary in practice in large games) where some probabilities are low while possibly heading toward zero in the limit, and exact equilibrium computation where the low probabilities are actually zero.

Dynamic Subtrees Queries Revisited: The Depth First Tour Tree

We report on experience related to the online training for the Italian and International Olympiads in Informatics (IOI). We developed an interactive online system, integrating the programming problems and the grading system used in several major programming contests, including the IOI. The system has been used in three distinct contexts: training students for the Italian Olympiads in Informatics (OII), training teachers in order to be able to assist students for the OII, and training the Italian team for the IOI. We also present the initial design of an extension deemed to provide trainees with a personalized support to skills’ enhancement on contest problems.

Extensive-Form Perfect Equilibrium Computation in Two-Player Games.

In the dynamic tree problem the goal is the maintenance of an arbitrary n-vertex forest, where the trees are subject to joining and splitting by, respectively, adding and removing edges. Depending on the application, information can be associated to nodes or edges (or both), and queries might require to combine values in path or (sub)trees. In this paper we present a novel data structure, called the Depth First Tour Tree, based on a linearization of a DFS visit of the tree. Despite the simplicity of the approach, similar to the ET-Trees (based on a Euler Tour), our data structure is able to answer queries related to both paths and (sub)trees. In particular, focusing on subtree computations, we show how to customize the data structure in order to answer queries for a concrete application: keeping track of the biconnectivity measures, including the impact of the removal of articulation points, of a dynamic undirected graph.