Related papers: Who to Trust for Truthfully Maximizing Welfare?
We investigate a model of sequential decision-making where a single alternative is chosen at each round. We focus on two objectives -- utilitarian welfare (Util) and egalitarian welfare (Egal) -- and consider the computational complexity of…
A set of divisible resources becomes available over a sequence of rounds and needs to be allocated immediately and irrevocably. Our goal is to distribute these resources to maximize fairness and efficiency. Achieving any non-trivial…
Suppose you run a home exam, where students should report their own scores but can cheat freely. You can, if needed, call a limited number of students to class and verify their actual performance against their reported score. We consider…
We study the power of item-pricing as a tool for approximately optimizing social welfare in a combinatorial market. We consider markets with $m$ indivisible items and $n$ buyers. The goal is to set prices to the items so that, when agents…
We consider the egalitarian welfare aspects of random assignment mechanisms when agents have unrestricted cardinal utilities over the objects. We give bounds on how well different random assignment mechanisms approximate the optimal…
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…
Recent work has constructed economic mechanisms that are both truthful and differentially private. In these mechanisms, privacy is treated separately from the truthfulness; it is not incorporated in players' utility functions (and doing so…
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…
We propose a new model for aggregating preferences over a set of indivisible items based on a quantile value. In this model, each agent is endowed with a specific quantile, and the value of a given bundle is defined by the corresponding…
In many societal resource allocation domains, machine learning methods are increasingly used to either score or rank agents in order to decide which ones should receive either resources (e.g., homeless services) or scrutiny (e.g., child…
For the fundamental problem of allocating a set of resources among individuals with varied preferences, the quality of an allocation relates to the degree of fairness and the collective welfare achieved. Unfortunately, in many…
There has been much recent work on the revenue-raising properties of truthful mechanisms for selling goods to selfish bidders. Typically the revenue of a mechanism is compared against a benchmark (such as, the maximum revenue obtainable by…
We consider a task of scheduling with a common deadline on a single machine. Every player reports to a scheduler the length of his job and the scheduler needs to finish as many jobs as possible by the deadline. For this simple problem,…
We study the efficiency guarantees in the simple auction environment where the auctioneer has one unit of divisible good to be distributed among a number of budget constrained agents. With budget constraints, the social welfare cannot be…
We consider the fundamental problem of allocating a set of indivisible goods among strategic agents with additive valuation functions. It is well known that, in the absence of monetary transfers, Pareto efficient and truthful rules are…
We study truthful mechanisms for approximating the Maximin-Share (MMS) allocation of agents with additive valuations for indivisible goods. Algorithmically, constant factor approximations exist for the problem for any number of agents. When…
We study the mechanism design problem of allocating a set of indivisible items without monetary transfers. Despite the vast literature on this very standard model, it still remains unclear how do truthful mechanisms look like. We focus on…
We study truthful mechanisms for matching and related problems in a partial information setting, where the agents' true utilities are hidden, and the algorithm only has access to ordinal preference information. Our model is motivated by the…
Welfare economics relies on access to agents' utility functions: we revisit classical questions in welfare economics, assuming access to data on agents' past choices instead of their utilities. Our main result considers the existence of…
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…