Born December 1968

Tuomas Sandholm

Professor
Director, Agent-Mediated Electronic Marketplaces Laboratory

Carnegie Mellon University
Computer Science Department
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

 

Affiliated Professor

Machine Learning Department

sandholm AT cs.cmu.edu
(412) 268-8216 (office)
Office: Wean Hall 7127

Executive assistant: Marilyn Walgora
mwalgora AT cs.cmu.edu
(412) 268-3505, Wean Hall 7106

Research interests: Electronic commerce; game theory; mechanism design; artificial intelligence; multiagent systems; auctions and exchanges; automated negotiation and contracting; voting; coalition formation; safe exchange; search, integer programming and combinatorial optimization; preference elicitation; normative models of bounded rationality; resource-bounded reasoning; privacy; multiagent reinforcement learning.


Academic awards

·         IJCAI Computers and Thought Award 2003  (Award talk writeup: “Making Markets and Democracy Work: A Story of Incentives and Computing” in Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-03), p. 1649-1671.  Award talk (.ppt, 87MB with audio).

·         Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow 2003-2005

·         Inaugural ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award 2001

·         National Science Foundation Career Award 1997

Curriculum vitae, research statement, and teaching statement.

Recent courses taught:

·         CS 15-892 Foundations of Electronic Marketplaces

·         CS 15-780 / RI 16-731 Advanced AI (aka Fundamentals of AI for Robotics)

·         MS in Ecommerce Mini-Course 20-853: Electronic Negotiation

·         CS 15-381 Artificial Intelligence

Hiring PhD students as Graduate Research Assistants.

Advice for my research group.

CMU AI seminar series.


Some recommended publications by topic

A complete list of publications is available on my CV.

Broad overview articles (more specific review articles are listed under their respective topics below)

·         Sandholm, T. 2008.  Computing in Mechanism Design.  In the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics.

·         Sandholm, T. 1999. Distributed Rational Decision Making. In the textbook Multiagent Systems: A Modern Introduction to Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Weiß, G., ed., MIT Press. Pp. 201-258.

Automated mechanism design (AMD)

Overview (somewhat dated by now)

Research on the general problem

AMD for auctions, other selling mechanisms, and online mechanisms. (See also AMD work listed in section “Safe Exchange” below.)

Manipulation-optimal mechanism & criticisms of the revelation principle

·         Othman, A. and Sandholm, T.  2008.  The Cost and Windfall of Manipulability.  In the COMSOC-08 workshop, Liverpool, UK.  Early version presented as “Beyond the Revelation Principle: Manipulation-Optimal Mechanisms” at GAMES-08.

·         Conitzer, V. and Sandholm, T. 2003. Computational Criticisms of the Revelation Principle. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC V).  Also orally presented at LOFT-04.  Newer draft.

Algorithms and complexity of solving games (coalitional games and multiagent learning are discussed in their own sections later)

Sequential games, poker

Poker demonstrations (reviewed)

Normal form games and repeated games

Voting (privacy in voting is discussed in a separate section)

Preference elicitation in voting

Complexity of manipulating elections by insincere preference revelation

Other

 

Expressive commerce, expressive bidding, combinatorial auctions, expressive negotiation

Brief overview of our recent work on expressiveness

o   Sandholm, T.  2008.  Expressiveness in mechanisms and its relation to efficiency: Our experience from $40 billion of combinatorial multi-attribute auctions, and recent theory.  Extended abstract of an invited plenary talk given at the International Workshop on Computational Social Choice (COMSOC) and at the DIMACS-LAMSADE conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory.

Theory; Case studies; Large fielded systems; Bidding languages; Markets with side constraints & non-price attributes; Generalizations

o   Benisch, M., Sadeh, N., and Sandholm, T.  2008.  A Theory of Expressiveness in Mechanisms.  In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

o   Boutilier, C., Parkes, D., Sandholm, T., and Walsh, W.  2008.  Expressive Banner Ad Auctions and Model-Based Online Optimization for Clearing.  In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

o   Benisch, M., Sadeh, N., Sandholm, T.  2008.  The Cost of Inexpressiveness in Advertisement Auctions.  In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Ad Auctions.

o   Walsh, W., Parkes, D., Sandholm, T., and Boutilier, C.  2008.  Computing Reserve Prices and Identifying the Value Distribution in Real-World Auctions with Market Disruptions.  In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

o   Sandholm, T.  2007.  Expressive Commerce and Its Application to Sourcing: How We Conducted $35 Billion of Generalized Combinatorial Auctions.  AI Magazine, 28(3), 45-58, Fall. Conference version in IAAI-06, Deployed Application Award.

o   Sandholm, T., Levine, D., Concordia, M., Martyn, P., Hughes, R., Jacobs, J., and Begg, D.  2006.  Changing the Game in Strategic Sourcing at Procter & Gamble: Expressive Competition Enabled by Optimization.  (For the Franz Edelman Award submission by P&G and CombineNet.)    Interfaces 36(1), 55-68.  Special issue on the 2005 Edelman award competition.

o   Sandholm, T. and Suri, S. 2006.  Side Constraints and Non-Price Attributes in Markets.  Games and Economic Behavior 55: 321-330, Note. Longer earlier version in IJCAI-01 Workshop on Distributed Constraint Reasoning.

o   Parkes, D. and Sandholm, T.  2005.  Optimize-and-Dispatch Architecture for Expressive Ad Auctions.  In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Sponsored Search Auctions, at the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce.

o   Conitzer, V. and Sandholm, T. 2005.  Expressive Negotiation in Settings with Externalities. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Pittsburgh, PA.

o   Conitzer, V. and Sandholm, T. 2004.  Expressive Negotiation over Donations to Charities.  In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (ACM-EC).  

o   Sandholm, T.  2002.  eMediator: A Next Generation Electronic Commerce Server. Computational Intelligence 18(4): 656-676, Special issue on Agent Technology for Electronic Commerce.  Early versions: In Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AGENTS), Barcelona, Spain, June 3-8, 2000; In Proceedings of the AAAI-99 Workshop on AI in Electronic Commerce, p. 46-55; Washington University CS tech report January 1999.  (First combinatorial auction on the Internet?  Running since 1998.)

o   Sandholm, T. 1999.  eMediator: A Next Generation Electronic Commerce Server. At the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Intelligent Systems Demonstration Program (refereed demonstration), AAAI proceedings pp. 923-924.

Multi-item markets (combinatorial auctions and generalizations)

Winner determination (= market clearing), search, integer programming, mixed integer programming

o   Gilpin, A. and Sandholm, T.  2007.  Information-Theoretic Approaches to Branching in Search.  In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).

o   Sandholm, T. and Shields, R.  2006.  Nogood Learning for Mixed Integer Programming.  CMU Computer Science Department technical report CMU-CS-06-155.  (Short version presented at the workshop on “Hybrid methods and branching rules in combinatorial optimization”, Centre de recherches mathématiques, Concordia University, Montreal, 2006.)

o   Sandholm, T. 2006.  Optimal Winner Determination Algorithms.  Chapter 14 of the book Combinatorial Auctions, Cramton, Shoham, and Steinberg, eds., MIT Press.

o   Lehmann, D., Mueller, R., and Sandholm, T. 2006.  The Winner Determination Problem.  Chapter 12 of the book Combinatorial Auctions, Cramton, Shoham, and Steinberg, eds., MIT Press.

o   Conitzer, V., Derryberry, J., and Sandholm, T. 2004.  Combinatorial Auctions with Structured Item Graphs.  In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

o   Kothari, A., Sandholm, T., and Suri, S. 2002. Solving Combinatorial Exchanges: Optimality via a Few Partial Bids.  In Proceedings of the AAAI-02 workshop on AI for Intelligent Business.  Also: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce 2003, short paper.

o   Sandholm, T., Suri, S., Gilpin, A., and Levine, D. 2002. Winner Determination in Combinatorial Auction Generalizations. In Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS).  Early version: In Proceedings of the AGENTS-01 Workshop on Agent-based Approaches to B2B.

o   Sandholm, T., Suri, S., Gilpin, A., and Levine, D. 2005.  CABOB: A Fast Optimal Algorithm for Winner Determination in Combinatorial Auctions.  Management Science 51(3), 374-390, special issue on Electronic Markets.  (Earlier version in IJCAI-01.)

o   Sandholm, T. and Suri, S. 2003.  BOB: Improved Winner Determination in Combinatorial Auctions and Generalizations.  Artificial Intelligence, 145, 33-58.  Early version: Improved Algorithms for Optimal Winner Determination in Combinatorial Auctions and Generalizations. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2000.

o   Sandholm, T. 2002. Algorithm for Optimal Winner Determination in Combinatorial Auctions. Artificial Intelligence, 135, 1-54. World’s 24th most cited 2001 paper in computer science.  (Early version appeared as an invited talk at ICE-98, as a tech report 1/99, and as a paper in the Proceedings of IJCAI-99 = world’s 35th most cited 1999 paper in computer science).

Market anomalies

o   Conitzer, V. and Sandholm, T. 2006.  Failures of the VCG mechanism in combinatorial auctions and exchanges.  In Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS).  (Early version in AMEC-04.)

o   Gilpin, A. and Sandholm, T. 2004.  Arbitrage in combinatorial exchanges.  Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC) workshop.

Multi-unit markets

o   Sandholm, T. and Suri, S. 2002.  Optimal Clearing of Supply/Demand Curves.  In Proceedings of the 13th Annual International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC), Vancouver, Canada.  Also: AAAI-02 workshop on Agent-Based B2B Electronic Commerce Technologies.

o   Sandholm, T. and Suri, S. 2001. Market Clearability. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). 

Barter exchanges, matching markets, kidney exchange

o   Abraham, D., Blum, A., and Sandholm, T.  2007.  Clearing Algorithms for Barter Exchange Markets: Enabling Nationwide Kidney Exchanges.  In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC).

Online algorithms for exchanges

o   Blum, A., Sandholm, T., and Zinkevich, M.  2006.  Online Algorithms for Market Clearing.  Journal of the ACM, Vol. 53, No. 5, pp. 845-879.   (Conference version in SODA-02.)

Preference elicitation, “ascending” auctions & coherent pricing

Overview

o   Sandholm, T. and Boutilier, C.  2006.  Preference Elicitation in Combinatorial Auctions.  Chapter 10 of the book Combinatorial Auctions, Cramton, Shoham, and Steinberg, eds., MIT Press.

The original paper on preference elicitation in combinatorial auctions

o   Conen, W. and Sandholm, T. 2001. Preference Elicitation in Combinatorial Auctions: Extended Abstract. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (ACM-EC).

o   Conen, W. and Sandholm, T. 2001. Minimal Preference Elicitation in Combinatorial Auctions. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Workshop on Economic Agents, Models, and Mechanisms.

Effectiveness of preference elicitation in general combinatorial auctions

o   Hudson, B. and Sandholm, T. 2004. Effectiveness of Query Types and Policies for Preference Elicitation in Combinatorial Auctions.  In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS).  Partly subsumes the papers:

1.      Effectiveness of Preference Elicitation in Combinatorial Auctions.  In Proceedings of the Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC) workshop at AAMAS-02 (also: Carnegie Mellon University, Computer Science Department technical report CMU-CS-02-124, and Stanford Institute of Theoretical Economics (SITE-02) summer school).

2.      Using Value Queries in Combinatorial Auctions.  Poster paper in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (ACM-EC-03).  Extended draft.

3.      Generalizing Preference Elicitation in Combinatorial Auctions.  Poster paper in Proceedings of the  International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS-03).  Extended draft.

o   Conen, W. and Sandholm, T. 2002.  Partial-Revelation VCG Mechanism for Combinatorial Auctions.  In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).  

o   Conen, W. and Sandholm, T. 2002.  Differential-Revelation VCG Mechanisms for Combinatorial Auctions.  In Proceedings of the Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC) workshop.

Preferences for which elicitation can (not) be done in a polynomial worst-case number of queries

o   Conitzer, V. and Sandholm, T., and Santi, P.  2005.  Combinatorial Auctions with k-wise Dependent Valuations.  In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

o   Santi, P., Conitzer, V., and Sandholm, T.  2004.  Towards a Characterization of Polynomial Preference Elicitation with Value Queries in Combinatorial Auctions.  In Proceedings of the Conference on Computational Learning Theory (COLT).

o   Blum, A., Jackson, J., Sandholm, T. and Zinkevich, M.  2004.  Preference Elicitation and Query Learning. Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), 5: 649-667.  (Early version in COLT-03.)

o   Zinkevich, M., Blum, A. and Sandholm, T. 2003. On Polynomial-Time Preference Elicitation with Value Queries.  In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (ACM-EC).

Preference elicitation in combinatorial exchanges (& multi-robot systems)

o   Smith, T., and Sandholm, T. and Simmons, R. 2002.  Constructing and Clearing Combinatorial Exchanges Using Preference Elicitation.  In Proceedings of the AAAI-02 workshop on Preferences in AI and CP: Symbolic Approaches.

Coherent pricing

o   Conen, W. and Sandholm, T. 2004.  Coherent Pricing of Efficient Allocations in Combinatorial Economies.  In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), pp. 254-260, New York, July 19-23.  Earlier version in Proceedings of the AAAI-02 workshop on Game-Theoretic and Decision-Theoretic Agents.

Eliciting bid taker non-price preferences in (combinatorial) auctions: Automated scenario navigation

o   Boutilier, C., Sandholm, T., and Shields, R.  2004.  Eliciting bid taker non-price preferences in (Combinatorial) Auctions.  In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Bidding agents (for auctions, exchanges & general equilibrium markets)

Valuation calculation, and normative models of bounded rationality and information acquisition

·         Larson, K. and Sandholm, T. 2005. Mechanism Design and Deliberative Agents. Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS).  Early versions: Designing Auctions for Deliberative Agents in the AAMAS-04 workshop on Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce (AMEC-04), Springer LNCS 3435; Strategic Deliberation and Truthful Revelation: An Impossibility Result in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (ACM-EC-04).

·         Larson, K. and Sandholm, T.  2004. Experiments on Deliberation Equilibria in Auctions.  In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS).

·         Larson, K. and Sandholm, T. 2003.  Miscomputing Ratio: The Social Cost of Selfish Computing.  In Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS).  Early version: In Proceedings of the AAAI-02 workshop on Game-Theoretic and Decision-Theoretic Agents.

·         Larson, K. and Sandholm, T. 2001. Costly Valuation Computation in Auctions. In Proceedings of the Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning about Knowledge (TARK). 

·         Larson, K. and Sandholm, T. 2001. Computationally Limited Agents in Auctions. In Proceedings of the International