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Lectures

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The information contained in these lecture notes was compiled by the course TAs in 2017 and 2018, including Takehiro Oyakawa, Gianluca Pane, Gabe Bankman-Fried, and Enrique Areyan-Viqueira. They based these notes in large part on the lecture notes and accompanying videos of Tim Roughgarden's CS 364A and CS 364B courses at Stanford, and Jason Hartline's Mechanism Design and Approximation textbook.

Lecture	Topic	Readings
0		Guidelines for Class Participation
Help Sessions	Probability Proof Techniques Linear Programming Markov Decision Processes and Reinforcement Learning
1	Introduction to Game Theory Normal-Form Games Battle of the Sexes Beauty Contest	Essentials of Game Theory: Chapters 1 & 2 by Kevin Leyton-Brown and Yoav Shoham
2	Introduction to Auctions Incomplete-information Games Bayesian Battle of the Sexes Second-price Auctions First-price Auctions (Uniform Case) Order Statistics and Revenue Equivalence First-price Auction Bayes-Nash Equilibrium (General Case)	Essentials of Game Theory: Chapter 7 by Kevin Leyton-Brown and Yoav Shoham
3	Auction Design & the VCG Mechanism The Revelation Principle Independent Private Values Auction Design Goals The VCG Mechanism	Badminton and the Science of Rule Making Real Badminton Rally Fixed Badminton Rally
4	Welfare Maximization & Myerson's Lemma Myerson's Payment Characterization Applications of Myerson's Lemma Welfare-Maximizing Auctions Myerson's Lemma with Discrete Values	Myerson's Lemma (Stanford CS 364A)
5	Revenue Maximization & Myerson's Theorem Myerson's Optimal Auction Applications of Myerson's Theorem Revenue-Maximizing Auctions Regular and MHR Distributions	Myerson's Theorem (Stanford CS 364A)
6	Posted-Price Mechanisms Inverse Transform Sampling Introduction to Approximation Algorithms Posted-Price Mechanisms: Approximating Revenue Posted-Price Mechanisms: Approximating Welfare	Prior-Independent Approximations (Mechanism Design & Approximation)
7	Simple vs. Optimal Mechanisms Prophet Inequality	Prophet Inequality and Bulow-Klemperer (Stanford CS 364A) An Economic View of Prophet Inequalities
8	Iterative Auctions Ascending Auctions Combinatorial Auctions EPIC Ascending Auctions	The Magic of Auctions EPIC Auctions (Stanford CS 364B)
9	Walrasian Equilibrium Unit-Demand Valuations and the CK Auction	Unit-Demand Valuations (Stanford CS 364B) CK Auction (Stanford CS 364B)
10	Primal-Dual Auctions Unit-Demand Valuations and the Demange, et al. Auction	Multi-item Auctions (Demange, Gale, and Sotomayor)
11	Clinching Auction Gross Substitutes	Clinching Auction (Stanford CS 364B) Gross Substitutes (Stanford CS 364B)
Final Project	Advertising Exchanges AdX Game AdX Game, Formalized AdX Agent Design	TAC AdX Game Specification (2012)