The 1990 AI Fair

This year, as the finale to the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory's annual Winter Olympics, the Lab staged an AI Fair ??night devoted to displaying the wide variety of talents and interests within the laboratory. The Fair provided an outlet for creativity and fun in a carnival-like atmosphere. Students organized events from robot boat races to face-recognition vision contests. Research groups came together to make posters and booths explaining their work. The robots rolled down out of the labs, networks were turned over to aerial combat computer games and walls were decorated with posters of zany ideas for the future. Everyone pitched in, and this photograph album is a pictorial account of the fun that night at the AI Fair.

Temporary and Permanent Buyout Prices in Online Auctions

Increasingly used in online auctions, buyout prices allow bidders to instantly purchase the item listed. We distinguish two types: a temporary buyout option disappears if a bid above the reserve price is made; a permanent one remains throughout the auction or until it is exercised. In a model featuring time-sensitive bidders with uniform valuations and Poisson arrivals but endogenous bidding times, we focus on finding temporary and permanent buyout prices maximizing the seller's discounted revenue, and examine the relative benefit of using each type of option in various environments. We characterize equilibrium bidder strategies in both cases and then solve the problem of maximizing seller's utility by simulation. Our numerical experiments suggest that buyout options may significantly increase a seller’s revenue. Additionally, while a temporary buyout option promotes early bidding, a permanent option gives an incentive to the bidders to bid late, thus leading to concentrated bids near the end of the auction.