Related papers: On the Power of Randomization in Algorithmic Mecha…
We study the budget aggregation problem in which a set of strategic voters must split a finite divisible resource (such as money or time) among a set of competing projects. Our goal is twofold: We seek truthful mechanisms that provide…
The potential of the exact quantum information processing is an interesting, important and intriguing issue. For examples, it has been believed that quantum tools can provide significant, that is larger than polynomial, advantages in the…
The problem of scheduling unrelated machines has been studied since the inception of algorithmic mechanism design \cite{NR99}. It is a resource allocation problem that entails assigning $m$ tasks to $n$ machines for execution. Machines are…
Fixed-parameter algorithms, approximation algorithms and moderately exponential algorithms are three major approaches to algorithms design. While each of them being very active in its own, there is an increasing attention to the connection…
We study several questions related to diversifying search results. We give improved approximation algorithms in each of the following problems, together with some lower bounds. - We give a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for a…
We introduce a model of probabilistic verification in mechanism design. The principal elicits a message from the agent and then selects a test to give the agent. The agent's true type determines the probability with which he can pass each…
We study the problem of hiring a team of selfish agents to perform a task. Each agent is assumed to own one or more elements of a set system, and the auctioneer is trying to purchase a feasible solution by conducting an auction. Our goal is…
Randomization is a fundamental tool used in many theoretical and practical areas of computer science. We study here the role of randomization in the area of submodular function maximization. In this area most algorithms are randomized, and…
We consider a natural generalization of classical scheduling problems in which using a time unit for processing a job causes some time-dependent cost which must be paid in addition to the standard scheduling cost. We study the scheduling…
We investigate the power of randomness in the context of a fundamental Bayesian optimal mechanism design problem--a single seller aims to maximize expected revenue by allocating multiple kinds of resources to "unit-demand" agents with…
Reasoning under uncertainty is a fundamental challenge in Artificial Intelligence. As with most of these challenges, there is a harsh dilemma between the expressive power of the language used, and the tractability of the computational…
We study the problem of designing truthful and fair mechanisms when allocating a mixture of divisible and indivisible goods. We first show that there does not exist an EFM (envy-free for mixed goods) and truthful mechanism in general. This…
In this paper, we study a problem of truthful mechanism design for a strategic variant of the generalized assignment problem (GAP) in a both payment-free and prior-free environment. In GAP, a set of items has to be optimally assigned to a…
We develop a framework for obtaining polynomial time approximation schemes (PTAS) for a class of stochastic dynamic programs. Using our framework, we obtain the first PTAS for the following stochastic combinatorial optimization problems:…
We study the mechanism design problem of allocating a set of indivisible items without monetary transfers. Despite the vast literature on this very standard model, it still remains unclear how do truthful mechanisms look like. We focus on…
Robust estimation is much more challenging in high dimensions than it is in one dimension: Most techniques either lead to intractable optimization problems or estimators that can tolerate only a tiny fraction of errors. Recent work in…
In this work, we study spectrum auction problem where each request from secondary users has spatial, temporal, and spectral features. With the requests of secondary users and the reserve price of the primary user, our goal is to design…
A mixed shop is a manufacturing infrastructure designed to process a mixture of a set of flow-shop jobs and a set of open-shop jobs. Mixed shops are in general much more complex to schedule than flow-shops and open-shops, and have been…
In this paper, we show a tight approximation guarantee for budget-feasible mechanisms with an additive buyer. We propose a new simple randomized mechanism with approximation ratio of $2$, improving the previous best known result of $3$. Our…
First, we study geometric variants of the standard set cover motivated by assignment of directional antenna and shipping with deadlines, providing the first known polynomial-time exact solutions. Next, we consider the following general…