Related papers: Understanding Incentives: Mechanism Design becomes…
We consider optimal route planning when the objective function is a general nonlinear and non-monotonic function. Such an objective models user behavior more accurately, for example, when a user is risk-averse, or the utility function needs…
Budget feasible mechanism design studies procurement combinatorial auctions where the sellers have private costs to produce items, and the buyer(auctioneer) aims to maximize a social valuation function on subsets of items, under the budget…
Designing effective black-box optimizers is hampered by limited problem-specific knowledge and manual control that spans months for almost every detail. In this paper, we present \textit{DesignX}, the first automated algorithm design…
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…
We consider the facility location problem in the one-dimensional setting where each facility can serve a limited number of agents from the algorithmic and mechanism design perspectives. From the algorithmic perspective, we prove that the…
Black-box optimization is increasingly used in engineering design problems where simulation-based evaluations are costly and gradients are unavailable. In this context, the optimization community has largely analyzed algorithm performance…
Predictive algorithms are now used to help distribute a large share of our society's resources and sanctions, such as healthcare, loans, criminal detentions, and tax audits. Under the right circumstances, these algorithms can improve the…
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…
Maximizing a single submodular set function subject to a cardinality constraint is a well-studied and central topic in combinatorial optimization. However, finding a set that maximizes multiple functions at the same time is much less…
Many algorithms that are originally designed without explicitly considering incentive properties are later combined with simple pricing rules and used as mechanisms. The resulting mechanisms are often natural and simple to understand. But…
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…
In combinatorial auctions, a designer must decide how to allocate a set of indivisible items amongst a set of bidders. Each bidder has a valuation function which gives the utility they obtain from any subset of the items. Our focus is…
Fair allocation of indivisible goods studies allocating $m$ goods among $n$ agents in a fair manner. While fairness is a fundamental requirement in many real-world applications, it often conflicts with (economic) efficiency. This raises a…
We consider a multi-agent resource allocation setting that models the assignment of papers to reviewers. A recurring issue in allocation problems is the compatibility of welfare/efficiency and fairness. Given an oracle to find a…
We study bi-criteria combinatorial optimization under noisy function evaluations. While resilience and black-box offline-to-online reductions have been studied in single-objective settings, extending these ideas to bi-criteria problems…
Many auction settings implicitly or explicitly require that bidders are treated equally ex-ante. This may be because discrimination is philosophically or legally impermissible, or because it is practically difficult to implement or…
Constrained maximization of submodular functions poses a central problem in combinatorial optimization. In many realistic scenarios, a number of agents need to maximize multiple submodular objectives over the same ground set. We study such…
Algorithm selection, aiming to identify the best algorithm for a given problem, plays a pivotal role in continuous black-box optimization. A common approach involves representing optimization functions using a set of features, which are…
The approximation ratio has become one of the dominant measures in mechanism design problems. In light of analysis of algorithms, we define the \emph{smoothed approximation ratio} to compare the performance of the optimal mechanism and a…
We develop a framework for efficiently transforming certain approximation algorithms into differentially-private variants, in a black-box manner. Specifically, our results focus on algorithms A that output an approximation to a function f…