Related papers: Limitations of randomized mechanisms for combinato…
We study incentive compatible mechanisms for Combinatorial Auctions where the bidders have submodular (or XOS) valuations and are budget-constrained. Our objective is to maximize the \emph{liquid welfare}, a notion of efficiency for…
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…
We present a computationally-efficient truthful mechanism for combinatorial auctions with subadditive bidders that achieves an $O((\log\!\log{m})^3)$-approximation to the maximum welfare in expectation using $O(n)$ demand queries; here $m$…
We consider the fundamental problem of designing a truthful single-item auction with the challenging objective of extracting a large fraction of the highest agent valuation as revenue. Following a recent trend in algorithm design, we assume…
We revisit the well-studied problem of budget-feasible procurement, where a buyer with a strict budget constraint seeks to acquire services from a group of strategic providers (the sellers). During the last decade, several strategyproof…
We study the communication complexity of dominant strategy implementations of combinatorial auctions. We start with two domains that are generally considered "easy": multi-unit auctions with decreasing marginal values and combinatorial…
We study the efficiency (in terms of social welfare) of truthful and symmetric mechanisms in one-sided matching problems with {\em dichotomous preferences} and {\em normalized von Neumann-Morgenstern preferences}. We are particularly…
In Combinatorial Public Projects, there is a set of projects that may be undertaken, and a set of self-interested players with a stake in the set of projects chosen. A public planner must choose a subset of these projects, subject to a…
We consider truthful combinatorial auctions with items $M = [m]$ for sale to $n$ bidders, where each bidder $i$ has a private monotone valuation $v_i : 2^M \to R_+$. Among truthful mechanisms, maximal-in-range (MIR) mechanisms achieve the…
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…
For constrained, not necessarily monotone submodular maximization, all known approximation algorithms with ratio greater than $1/e$ require continuous ideas, such as queries to the multilinear extension of a submodular function and its…
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 multi-agent contract design with combinatorial actions, under budget constraints, and for a broad class of objective functions, including profit (principal's utility), reward, and welfare. Our first result is a strong…
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…
We provide the first separation in the approximation guarantee achievable by truthful and non-truthful combinatorial auctions with polynomial communication. Specifically, we prove that any truthful mechanism guaranteeing a…
We study auction design in the celebrated interdependence model introduced by Milgrom and Weber [1982], where a mechanism designer allocates a good, maximizing the value of the agent who receives it, while inducing truthfulness using…
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…
We study the communication complexity of welfare maximization in combinatorial auctions with $m$ items and two subadditive bidders. A $\frac{1}{2}$-approximation can be guaranteed by a trivial randomized protocol with zero communication, or…
This paper considers prior-independent mechanism design, namely identifying a single mechanism that has near optimal performance on every prior distribution. We show that mechanisms with truthtelling equilibria, a.k.a., revelation…
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…