[talks] Matheus Ferriera General Exam Presentation May 24, 2018 2:00 pm CS 302

[Barbara A. Mooring]

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