Related papers: Welfare Undominated Groves Mechanisms
The family of Groves mechanisms, which includes the well-known VCG mechanism (also known as the Clarke mechanism), is a family of efficient and strategy-proof mechanisms. Unfortunately, the Groves mechanisms are generally not budget…
We are interested in mechanisms that maximize social welfare. In [1] this problem was studied for multi-unit auctions with unit demand bidders and for the public project problem, and in each case social welfare undominated mechanisms in the…
We study social welfare in one-sided matching markets where the goal is to efficiently allocate n items to n agents that each have a complete, private preference list and a unit demand over the items. Our focus is on allocation mechanisms…
It is well-known that for several natural decision problems no budget balanced Groves mechanisms exist. This has motivated recent research on designing variants of feasible Groves mechanisms (termed as `redistribution of VCG…
We study budget aggregation under $\ell_1$-utilities, a model for collective decision making in which agents with heterogeneous preferences must allocate a public budget across a set of alternatives. Each agent reports their preferred…
We study a multi-round welfare-maximising mechanism design problem in instances where agents do not know their values. On each round, a mechanism first assigns an allocation each to a set of agents and charges them a price; at the end of…
Many important problems in multiagent systems involve resource allocations. Self-interested agents may lie about their valuations if doing so increases their own utilities. Therefore, it is necessary to design mechanisms (collective…
We consider a task of scheduling with a common deadline on a single machine. Every player reports to a scheduler the length of his job and the scheduler needs to finish as many jobs as possible by the deadline. For this simple problem,…
We study the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…
We consider a multi-agent resource allocation setting that models the assignment of papers to reviewers. A recurring issue in allocation problems is the compatibility of welfare/efficiency and fairness. Given an oracle to find a…
We study mechanism design for nonexcludable and excludable binary public project problems. We aim to maximize the expected number of consumers and the expected social welfare. For the nonexcludable public project model, we identify a…
The focus of classic mechanism design has been on truthful direct-revelation mechanisms. In the context of combinatorial auctions the truthful direct-revelation mechanism that maximizes social welfare is the VCG mechanism. For many…
Price of anarchy quantifies the degradation of social welfare in games due to the lack of a centralized authority that can enforce the optimal outcome. At its antipodes, mechanism design studies how to ameliorate these effects by…
We draw attention to an important, yet largely overlooked aspect of evaluating fairness for automated decision making systems---namely risk and welfare considerations. Our proposed family of measures corresponds to the long-established…
Research on promoting cooperation among autonomous, self-regarding agents has often focused on the bi-objective optimisation problem: minimising the total incentive cost while maximising the frequency of cooperation. However, the optimal…
We study the power of item-pricing as a tool for approximately optimizing social welfare in a combinatorial market. We consider markets with $m$ indivisible items and $n$ buyers. The goal is to set prices to the items so that, when agents…
We study the Price of Anarchy of mechanisms for the well-known problem of one-sided matching, or house allocation, with respect to the social welfare objective. We consider both ordinal mechanisms, where agents submit preference lists over…
Computational and economic results suggest that social welfare maximization and combinatorial auction design are much easier when bidders' valuations satisfy the "gross substitutes" condition. The goal of this paper is to evaluate…
We analyze the Vickrey mechanism for auctions of multiple identical goods when the players have both Knightian uncertainty over their own valuations and incomplete preferences. In this model, the Vickrey mechanism is no longer…
Without monetary payments, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem proves that under mild requirements all truthful social choice mechanisms must be dictatorships. When payments are allowed, the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism implements…