Related papers: An Impossibility Result for Truthful Combinatorial…
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…
Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The…
We consider the problem of designing a revenue-maximizing auction for a single item, when the values of the bidders are drawn from a correlated distribution. We observe that there exists an algorithm that finds the optimal randomized…
We study individual rational, Pareto optimal, and incentive compatible mechanisms for auctions with heterogeneous items and budget limits. For multi-dimensional valuations we show that there can be no deterministic mechanism with these…
Algorithmic mechanism design (AMD) studies the delicate interplay between computational efficiency, truthfulness, and optimality. We focus on AMD's paradigmatic problem: combinatorial auctions. We present a new generalization of the VC…
We explore the approximation power of deterministic obviously strategy-proof mechanisms in auctions, where the objective is welfare maximization. A trivial ascending auction on the grand bundle guarantees an approximation of $\min\{m,n\}$…
We present a new type of monotone submodular functions: \emph{multi-peak submodular functions}. Roughly speaking, given a family of sets $\cF$, we construct a monotone submodular function $f$ with a high value $f(S)$ for every set $S \in…
We present a new approach to machine learning-powered combinatorial auctions, which is based on the principles of Differential Privacy. Our methodology guarantees that the auction mechanism is truthful, meaning that rational bidders have…
We consider the fundamental mechanism design problem of approximate social welfare maximization under general cardinal preferences on a finite number of alternatives and without money. The well-known range voting scheme can be thought of as…
Combinatorial auctions (CA) are a well-studied area in algorithmic mechanism design. However, contrary to the standard model, empirical studies suggest that a bidder's valuation often does not depend solely on the goods assigned to him. For…
We provide a computationally efficient black-box reduction from mechanism design to algorithm design in very general settings. Specifically, we give an approximation-preserving reduction from truthfully maximizing \emph{any} objective under…
It is widely believed that computing payments needed to induce truthful bidding is somehow harder than simply computing the allocation. We show that the opposite is true: creating a randomized truthful mechanism is essentially as easy as a…
In online combinatorial allocations/auctions, n bidders sequentially arrive, each with a combinatorial valuation (such as submodular/XOS) over subsets of m indivisible items. The aim is to immediately allocate a subset of the remaining…
Revealed preference techniques are used to test whether a data set is compatible with rational behaviour. They are also incorporated as constraints in mechanism design to encourage truthful behaviour in applications such as combinatorial…
We study the power of polynomial-time truthful mechanisms comparing to polynomial time (non-truthful) algorithms. We show that there is a setting in which deterministic polynomial-time truthful mechanisms cannot guarantee a bounded…
We study combinatorial auctions with interdependent valuations. In such settings, each agent $i$ has a private signal $s_i$ that captures her private information, and the valuation function of every agent depends on the entire signal…
The design of revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions, i.e. multi-item auctions over bundles of goods, is one of the most fundamental problems in computational economics, unsolved even for two bidders and two items for sale. In the…
If a two-player social welfare maximization problem does not admit a PTAS, we prove that any maximal-in-range truthful mechanism that runs in polynomial time cannot achieve an approximation factor better than 1/2. Moreover, for the k-player…
The notion of \emph{envy-freeness} is a natural and intuitive fairness requirement in resource allocation. With indivisible goods, such fair allocations are unfortunately not guaranteed to exist. Classical works have avoided this issue by…
We introduce a general approach based on \emph{selective verification} and obtain approximate mechanisms without money for maximizing the social welfare in the general domain of utilitarian voting. Having a good allocation in mind, a…