Related papers: Frugal Mechanism Design via Spectral Techniques
We consider the impact of fairness requirements on the social efficiency of truthful mechanisms for trade, focusing on Bayesian bilateral-trade settings. Unlike the full information case in which all gains-from-trade can be realized and…
It is typically expected that if a mechanism is truthful, then the agents would, indeed, truthfully report their private information. But why would an agent believe that the mechanism is truthful? We wish to design truthful mechanisms,…
We study a budget-aggregation setting in which a number of voters report their ideal distribution of a budget over a set of alternatives, and a mechanism aggregates these reports into an allocation. Ideally, such mechanisms are truthful,…
Mechanism design in resource allocation studies dividing limited resources among self-interested agents whose satisfaction with the allocation depends on privately held utilities. We consider the problem in a payment-free setting, with the…
A major achievement of mechanism design theory is a general method for the construction of truthful mechanisms called VCG (Vickrey, Clarke, Groves). When applying this method to complex problems such as combinatorial auctions, a difficulty…
We study procurement games where each seller supplies multiple units of his item, with a cost per unit known only to him. The buyer can purchase any number of units from each seller, values different combinations of the items differently,…
We consider a selfish variant of the knapsack problem. In our version, the items are owned by agents, and each agent can misrepresent the set of items she owns---either by avoiding reporting some of them (understating), or by reporting…
An important research thread in algorithmic game theory studies the design of efficient truthful mechanisms that approximate the optimal social welfare. A fundamental question is whether an \alpha-approximation algorithm translates into an…
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…
We present and discuss general techniques for proving inapproximability results for truthful mechanisms. We make use of these techniques to prove lower bounds on the approximability of several non-utilitarian multi-parameter problems. In…
We study truthful mechanisms for allocation problems in graphs, both for the minimization (i.e., scheduling) and maximization (i.e., auctions) setting. The minimization problem is a special case of the well-studied unrelated machines…
Peer prediction mechanisms incentivize agents to truthfully report their signals even in the absence of verification by comparing agents' reports with those of their peers. In the detail-free multi-task setting, agents respond to multiple…
Secondary spectrum auction is widely applied in wireless networks for mitigating the spectrum scarcity. In a realistic spectrum trading market, the requests from secondary users often specify the usage of a fixed spectrum frequency band in…
This work gives the first natural non-utilitarian problems for which the trivial $n$ approximation via VCG mechanisms is the best possible. That is, no truthful mechanism can be better than $n$ approximate, where $n$ is the number of…
We study the game-theoretic task of selecting mobile agents to deliver multiple items on a network. An instance is given by $m$ messages (physical objects) which have to be transported between specified source-target pairs in a weighted…
Many smart grid frameworks, such as demand response programs, require accurate information about consumers' parameters (e.g., flexibility) at the aggregator side to optimize grid operations. Existing works typically rely on perfect…
Consider a barter exchange problem over a finite set of agents, where each agent owns an item and is also associated with a (privately known) wish list of items belonging to the other agents. An outcome of the problem is a (re)allocation of…
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…
A principal selects a team of agents for collaborating on a joint project. The principal aims to design a revenue-optimal contract that incentivize the team of agents to exert costly effort while satisfying fairness constraints. We show…
In fraud detection applications, the investigator is typically limited to controlling a restricted number k of cases. The most efficient manner of allocating the resources is then to try selecting the k cases with the highest probability of…