Lectures on Optimal Mechanism Design

These lecture notes cover the second third of the class CS364B, Topics in Algorithmic Game Theory, offered at Stanford University in the Fall 2005 term. They cover the topic of optimal mechanism design. As this is a traditional economic objective, we will review the Economics treatment of optimal mechanism design first before moving on to cover recent work on the problem from the theoretical computer science community. Prerequisites for reading these lecture notes are basic understanding of algorithms and complexity as well as elementary calculus and probability theory. I will also assume that the reader has access to the notes on the first third of this course which covers combinatorial auctions. Thanks to the students of CS364B, Ning Chen, and co-instructor Tim Roughgarden. Comments are welcome.