Related papers: Single-Call Mechanisms
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 this paper we show that payment computation essentially does not present any obstacle in designing truthful mechanisms, even for multi-parameter domains, and even when we can only call the allocation rule once. We present a general…
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 the communication complexity of truthful combinatorial auctions, and in particular the case where valuations are either subadditive or single-minded, which we denote with $\mathsf{SubAdd}\cup\mathsf{SingleM}$. We show that for…
One of the fundamental questions of Algorithmic Mechanism Design is whether there exists an inherent clash between truthfulness and computational tractability: in particular, whether polynomial-time truthful mechanisms for combinatorial…
Mechanism design uses the tools of economics and game theory to design rules of interaction for economic transactions that will,in principle, yield some de- sired outcome. In the last few years this field has received much interest of…
The classic Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism ensures incentive compatibility, i.e., that truth-telling of all agents is a dominant strategy, for a static one-shot game. However, in a dynamic environment that unfolds over time, the…
In a single-parameter mechanism design problem, a provider is looking to sell a service to a group of potential buyers. Each buyer $i$ has a private value $v_i$ for receiving the service and a feasibility constraint restricts which sets of…
We consider the problem of designing truthful auctions, when the bidders' valuations have a public and a private component. In particular, we consider combinatorial auctions where the valuation of an agent $i$ for a set $S$ of items can be…
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…
In the standard single-dimensional model of position auctions, bidders agree on the relative values of the positions and each of them submits a single bid that is interpreted in terms of these values. Motivated by current practice in…
Sponsored search auctions constitute one of the most successful applications of microeconomic mechanisms. In mechanism design, auctions are usually designed to incentivize advertisers to bid their truthful valuations and to assure both the…
We study the communication complexity of combinatorial auctions via interpolation mechanisms that interpolate between non-truthful and truthful protocols. Specifically, an interpolation mechanism has two phases. In the first phase, the…
Recently, a randomized mechanism has been discovered [Dughmi, Roughgarden and Yan; STOC'11] for combinatorial auctions that is truthful in expectation and guarantees a (1-1/e)-approximation to the optimal social welfare when players have…
While the classic Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism ensures incentive compatibility for a static one-shot game, it does not appear to be feasible to construct a dominant truth-telling mechanism for agents that are stochastic dynamic systems.…
We show that every universally truthful randomized mechanism for combinatorial auctions with submodular valuations that provides $m^{\frac 1 2 -\epsilon}$ approximation to the social welfare and uses value queries only must use…
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,…
In markets such as digital advertising auctions, bidders want to maximize value rather than payoff. This is different to the utility functions typically assumed in auction theory and leads to different strategies and outcomes. We refer to…
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 investigate {\em multidimensional covering mechanism-design} problems, wherein there are $m$ items that need to be covered and $n$ agents who provide covering objects, with each agent $i$ having a private cost for the covering objects he…