arXiv subjects

Mingyu Guo

Publications and source records attributed to Mingyu Guo.

81 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Optimizing Affine Maximizer Auctions via Linear Programming: an Application to Revenue Maximizing Mechanism Design for Zero-Day Exploits Markets

Optimizing within the affine maximizer auctions (AMA) is an effective approach for revenue maximizing mechanism design. The AMA mechanisms are strategy-proof and individually rational (if the agents' valuations for the outcomes are nonnegative). Every AMA mechanism is characterized by a list of parameters. By focusing on the AMA mechanisms, we turn mechanism design into a value optimization problem, where we only need to adjust the parameters. We propose a linear programming based heuristic for optimizing within the AMA family. We apply our technique to revenue maximizing mechanism design for zero-day exploit markets. We show that due to the nature of the zero-day exploit markets, if there are only two agents (one offender and one defender), then our technique generally produces a near optimal mechanism: the mechanism's expected revenue is close to the optimal revenue achieved by the optimal strategy-proof and individually rational mechanism (not necessarily an AMA mechanism).

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arXiv2020

Mechanism Design for Public Projects via Neural Networks

We study mechanism design for nonexcludable and excludable binary public project problems. We aim to maximize the expected number of consumers and the expected social welfare. For the nonexcludable public project model, we identify a sufficient condition on the prior distribution for the conservative equal costs mechanism to be the optimal strategy-proof and individually rational mechanism. For general distributions, we propose a dynamic program that solves for the optimal mechanism. For the excludable public project model, we identify a similar sufficient condition for the serial cost sharing mechanism to be optimal for $2$ and $3$ agents. We derive a numerical upper bound. Experiments show that for several common distributions, the serial cost sharing mechanism is close to optimality. The serial cost sharing mechanism is not optimal in general. We design better performing mechanisms via neural networks. Our approach involves several technical innovations that can be applied to mechanism design in general. We interpret the mechanisms as price-oriented rationing-free (PORF) mechanisms, which enables us to move the mechanism's complex (e.g., iterative) decision making off the network, to a separate program. We feed the prior distribution's analytical form into the cost function to provide quality gradients for training. We use supervision to manual mechanisms as a systematic way for initialization. Our approach of "supervision and then gradient descent" is effective for improving manual mechanisms' performances. It is also effective for fixing constraint violations for heuristic-based mechanisms that are infeasible.

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arXiv2020

Gini Index based Initial Coin Offering Mechanism

As a fundraising method, Initial Coin Offering (ICO) has raised billions of dollars for thousands of startups in the past two years. Existing ICO mechanisms place more emphasis on the short-term benefits of maximal fundraising while ignoring the problem of unbalanced token allocation, which negatively impacts subsequent fundraising and has bad effects on introducing new investors and resources. We propose a new ICO mechanism which uses the concept of Gini index for the very first time as a mechanism design constraint to control allocation inequality. Our mechanism maintains an elegant and straightforward structure. It allows the agents to modify their bids as a price discovery process, while limiting the bids of whales. We analyze the agents' equilibrium behaviors under our mechanism. Under natural technical assumptions, we show that most agents have simple dominant strategies and the equilibrium revenue approaches the optimal revenue asymptotically in the number of agents. We verify our mechanism using real ICO dataset we collected, and confirm that our mechanism performs well in terms of both allocation fairness and revenue.

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arXiv2019

Game theoretical modelling of network/cybersecurity

Game theory is an established branch of mathematics that offers a rich set of mathematical tools for multi-person strategic decision making that can be used to model the interactions of decision makers in security problems who compete for limited and shared resources. This article presents a review of the literature in the area of game theoretical modelling of network/cybersecurity.

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arXiv2017

Understanding the Heterogeneity of Contributors in Bug Bounty Programs

Background: While bug bounty programs are not new in software development, an increasing number of companies, as well as open source projects, rely on external parties to perform the security assessment of their software for reward. However, there is relatively little empirical knowledge about the characteristics of bug bounty program contributors. Aim: This paper aims to understand those contributors by highlighting the heterogeneity among them. Method: We analyzed the histories of 82 bug bounty programs and 2,504 distinct bug bounty contributors, and conducted a quantitative and qualitative survey. Results: We found that there are project-specific and non-specific contributors who have different motivations for contributing to the products and organizations. Conclusions: Our findings provide insights to make bug bounty programs better and for further studies of new software development roles.

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arXiv2013

Revenue Maximization via Hiding Item Attributes

We study probabilistic single-item second-price auctions where the item is characterized by a set of attributes. The auctioneer knows the actual instantiation of all the attributes, but he may choose to reveal only a subset of these attributes to the bidders. Our model is an abstraction of the following Ad auction scenario. The website (auctioneer) knows the demographic information of its impressions, and this information is in terms of a list of attributes (e.g., age, gender, country of location). The website may hide certain attributes from its advertisers (bidders) in order to create thicker market, which may lead to higher revenue. We study how to hide attributes in an optimal way. We show that it is NP-hard to solve for the optimal attribute hiding scheme. We then derive a polynomial-time solvable upper bound on the optimal revenue. Finally, we propose two heuristic-based attribute hiding schemes. Experiments show that revenue achieved by these schemes is close to the upper bound.

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arXiv2013

Undominated Groves Mechanisms

The family of Groves mechanisms, which includes the well-known VCG mechanism (also known as the Clarke mechanism), is a family of efficient and strategy-proof mechanisms. Unfortunately, the Groves mechanisms are generally not budget balanced. That is, under such mechanisms, payments may flow into or out of the system of the agents, resulting in deficits or reduced utilities for the agents. We consider the following problem: within the family of Groves mechanisms, we want to identify mechanisms that give the agents the highest utilities, under the constraint that these mechanisms must never incur deficits. We adopt a prior-free approach. We introduce two general measures for comparing mechanisms in prior-free settings. We say that a non-deficit Groves mechanism $M$ {\em individually dominates} another non-deficit Groves mechanism $M'$ if for every type profile, every agent's utility under $M$ is no less than that under $M'$, and this holds with strict inequality for at least one type profile and one agent. We say that a non-deficit Groves mechanism $M$ {\em collectively dominates} another non-deficit Groves mechanism $M'$ if for every type profile, the agents' total utility under $M$ is no less than that under $M'$, and this holds with strict inequality for at least one type profile. The above definitions induce two partial orders on non-deficit Groves mechanisms. We study the maximal elements corresponding to these two partial orders, which we call the {\em individually undominated} mechanisms and the {\em collectively undominated} mechanisms, respectively.

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arXiv2012

False-name-proofness with Bid Withdrawal

We study a more powerful variant of false-name manipulation in Internet auctions: an agent can submit multiple false-name bids, but then, once the allocation and payments have been decided, withdraw some of her false-name identities (have some of her false-name identities refuse to pay). While these withdrawn identities will not obtain the items they won, their initial presence may have been beneficial to the agent's other identities. We define a mechanism to be false-name-proof with withdrawal (FNPW) if the aforementioned manipulation is never beneficial. FNPW is a stronger condition than false-name-proofness (FNP).

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arXiv2008

Welfare Undominated Groves Mechanisms

A common objective in mechanism design is to choose the outcome (for example, allocation of resources) that maximizes the sum of the agents' valuations, without introducing incentives for agents to misreport their preferences. The class of Groves mechanisms achieves this; however, these mechanisms require the agents to make payments, thereby reducing the agents' total welfare. In this paper we introduce a measure for comparing two mechanisms with respect to the final welfare they generate. This measure induces a partial order on mechanisms and we study the question of finding minimal elements with respect to this partial order. In particular, we say a non-deficit Groves mechanism is welfare undominated if there exists no other non-deficit Groves mechanism that always has a smaller or equal sum of payments. We focus on two domains: (i) auctions with multiple identical units and unit-demand bidders, and (ii) mechanisms for public project problems. In the first domain we analytically characterize all welfare undominated Groves mechanisms that are anonymous and have linear payment functions, by showing that the family of optimal-in-expectation linear redistribution mechanisms, which were introduced in [6] and include the Bailey-Cavallo mechanism [1,2], coincides with the family of welfare undominated Groves mechanisms that are anonymous and linear in the setting we study. In the second domain we show that the classic VCG (Clarke) mechanism is welfare undominated for the class of public project problems with equal participation costs, but is not undominated for a more general class.

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