Social welfare in one-sided matchings: Random priority and beyond
Abstract
We study the problem of approximate social welfare maximization (without money) in one-sided matching problems when agents have unrestricted cardinal preferences over a finite set of items. Random priority is a very well-known truthful-in-expectation mechanism for the problem. We prove that the approximation ratio of random priority is Theta(n^{-1/2}) while no truthful-in-expectation mechanism can achieve an approximation ratio better than O(n^{-1/2}), where n is the number of agents and items. Furthermore, we prove that the approximation ratio of all ordinal (not necessarily truthful-in-expectation) mechanisms is upper bounded by O(n^{-1/2}), indicating that random priority is asymptotically the best truthful-in-expectation mechanism and the best ordinal mechanism for the problem.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1403.1508,
title = {Social welfare in one-sided matchings: Random priority and beyond},
author = {Aris Filos-Ratsikas and Søren Kristoffer Stiil Frederiksen and Jie Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1403.1508},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
13 pages