Matheus Ferriera will present his General Exam Presentation on May 24, 2018 at 2:00 pm in CS 302. Commttee: Matt Weinberg, Adviser Ran Raz Ed Felten Title: To Mitigate Insecure IoT Devices, Regulate Manufacturers or Consumers? Abstract: The area of Algorithmic Mechanism Design focuses on designing efficient economic mechanisms where players act rationally towards their own selfish goals. Under this model, in the domain of auction design, the auction designer wants to maximize their revenue while guaranteeing that bidders are truthful. In this work, we propose a model where a third-party, with a distinct objective from the auctioneer, can influence the prior distribution of bidders in the single buyer, single seller setting. As motivation, we model the problem of a policy maker that can regulate either the manufacturer, by imposing minimum security standards, or the consumer, by imposing fines, with the goal to mitigate insecure IoT devices and still provide minimum revenue guarantees to the manufacturer. We prove that under some distribution assumptions, it is either optimal for a policy maker to regulate only manufacturers or only consumers. We also prove that when our assumptions are not present, we might have an unbounded penalty for not regulating both consumers and manufactures. As future directions, we would like to study approximation guarantees for general distributions. In addition, we propose empirical experiments in an online marketplace to validate the model. Joint work with Matt Weinberg, Nick Feamster, Danny Yuxing Huang, Tithi Chattopadhyay Barbara A. Mooring Interim Graduate Coordinator Computer Science Department Princeton University