Scope

In 2006, Procaccia and Rosenschein considered the setting in which the agents have explicit numerical values for the possible outcomes, yet they only report their linear orderings over them. To compare different aggregation mechanisms, they introduced the notion of distortion, which quantifies the inefficiency of using only ordinal information when trying to maximize the social welfare, i.e., the sum of the underlying values of the agents for the chosen outcome. Since then, this research area has flourished (counting more than 30 published papers in EC, AAAI, IJCAI, and NeurIPS) and bounds on the distortion have been obtained for a wide variety of fundamental scenarios.

This workshop will serve as a platform for presenting some of the most influential work on distortion and also recent developments on the tradeoffs between information and efficiency. The goal is to initiate interesting discussions and collaborations by bringing together researchers with significant contribution to the literature of distortion, and people who are interested in familiarizing themselves with the topic.

Call for short talks

Besides the main talks of the workshop, we invite short talks (approximately 10-15 minutes, depending on their number) related to the theme of the workshop. Everyone is welcome to give a short talk, but if there is a lot of demand, priority will be given to PhD students and postdocs. If you are interested in giving a talk, please send us a request to dietworkshop2020@gmail.com with title "DIET Short Talk" and including

• The title and abstract for the talk

• A link to a version of the paper (if available)

• The publication venue (if any)

Deadline for short talk requests: 12 July 2020 (AoE)

Organizers

Elliot Anshelevich, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Aris Filos-Ratsikas, University of Liverpool

Nisarg Shah, University of Toronto

Alexandros Voudouris, University of Essex