Optimal mechanism design using interior-point methods

This paper presents a primal-dual interior point algorithm for linearly con strained convex nonlinear programming and computational experience in solvi ng optimal mechanism design problems using the algorithm. These problems ar e frequently formulated as convex programming problems, i.e. problems with linear constraints and an objective function formed as a sum of squared qua ntities, The algorithm has been implemented and tested on an IBM PC compute r. The computational results demonstrated that the algorithm finds an appro ximate optimal solution in fewer iterations and function evaluations, the o btained solution usually being an interior feasible solution, and so the re sulting method is very efficient and effective. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science L td. All rights reserved.