overall like Celia’s ideas of:

a couple of people - figures silhouetted - who are interacting with the concepts as if in the landscape or on the stage of these concepts.

chessboards - a repeated pattern that subtly evokes the
idea of gaming and strategy
albers, delaunay-like based abstract imagery
this piece:
From intro paragraph: ...in application areas: internet-like networks
and non-traditional auctions motivate much of the work in AGt
network map, Auction paddles, strategy, directionals
http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/greathomesanddestinations/28
auctions.html?fta=y
http://www.rappart.com/index.php?section=portfolio&portnum=167&
img=6133

http://www.liftconference.com/files/network1.png

anarchy - something about paths and routing, multidirectional movement in a space

 

plicitly elicited from self-interested participants. Auction settings are canonical examples, where the private data is the willingness to pay of the bidders for the goods on sale, and the optimization problem is to allocate the goods to maximize some objective, such as revenue or overall value to society. A “mechanism” is a protocol that interacts with participants and determines a solution to the underlying optimization problem.

Illus TRATIon by CelIA johnson

There is a complex dependence be-
tween the way a mechanism employs
elicited data and participant behav-
ior. For example, consider the sale of a
single good in a sealed-bid auction with
several bidders. In a “first-price” auc-
tion, the selling price is the bid of the
winner (that is, the maximum bid). Bid-
ders naturally shade their bids below
their maximum willingness to pay in
first-price auctions, aspiring to achieve
the lowest-possible price subject to
winning the auction. Determining how
much to shade requires guessing about
the behavior of the other bidders. A dif-
ferent auction is the “second-price” auc-
tion, in which the selling price is only
the second-highest bid. A famous result
of Vickrey43 is that every participant of
a second-price auction may as well bid
its true value for the good: intuitively, a
second-price auction optimally shades
the bid of the winner on its behalf, to the
minimum alternative winning bid. eBay
and Amazon auctions are similar to sec-
ond-price auctions in many (but not all)
respects; see Steiglitz42 for a detailed dis-
cussion. Keyword search auctions, such
as those run by Google, Yahoo!, and
Microsoft, are more complex variants
of second-price auctions with multiple
heterogeneous goods, corresponding to
the potential ad slots on a search results
page. Lahaie et al. 30 provide an overview
of theoretical work on search auctions.