Distributed Algorithmic Mechanism Design (DAMD) combines theoretical computer science’s traditional focus on computational tractability with its more recent interest in incentive compatibility and distributed computing. The Internet’s decentralized nature, in which distributed computation and autonomous agents prevail, makes DAMD a very natural approach for many Internet problems. This paper first outlines the basics of DAMD and then reviews previous DAMD results on multicast cost sharing and interdomain routing. The remainder of the paper describes several promising research directions and poses some specific open problems.

The Distributed Computing Column covers the theory of systems that are composed of a number of interacting computing elements. These include problems of communication and networking, databases, distributed shared memory, multiprocessor architectures, operating systems, veri cation, internet, and the web.

This thesis designs and analyzes auctions for persistent goods in three domains with arriving and departing bidders, quantifying tradeoffs between design objectives. The central objective is incentive compatibility, ensuring that it is in bidders’ best interest to reveal their private information truthfully. Other primary concerns are expressiveness, i.e. the richness of the effective bidding language, and optimization, in the form of aiming towards high revenue or high value of the allocation of goods to bidders. In the first domain, an arriving bidder requests a fixed number of goods by his departure, introducing combinatorial constraints. I achieve the global property of incentive compatibility via self-correction, a local verification procedure, applied to a heuristic modification of an online stochastic algorithm. This heuristic is flexible and has encouraging empirical performance in terms of allocation value, revenue and computation overhead. In the second domain, impatient buyers make instantaneous reservation offers for future goods. Introducing the practical ability of cancellations by the seller leads to an auction with worst-case guarantees without any assumption on the sequence of offers. A