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Related papers: On Welfare Approximation and Stable Pricing

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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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-06-26 Christopher P Chambers , Federico Echenique

The fair division of resources is an important age-old problem that has led to a rich body of literature. At the center of this literature lies the question of whether there exist fair mechanisms despite strategic behavior of the agents. A…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-05-16 Simina Brânzei , Vasilis Gkatzelis , Ruta Mehta

Walrasian prices, if they exist, have the property that one can assign every buyer some bundle in her demand set, such that the resulting assignment will maximize social welfare. Unfortunately, this assumes carefully breaking ties amongst…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-06-06 Vincent Cohen-Addad , Alon Eden , Michal Feldman , Amos Fiat

We study the allocation of indivisible items that form an undirected graph and investigate the worst-case welfare loss when requiring that each agent must receive a connected subgraph. Our focus is on both egalitarian and utilitarian…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Xiaohui Bei , Alexander Lam , Xinhang Lu , Warut Suksompong

We study the revenue guarantees and approximability of item pricing. Recent work shows that with $n$ heterogeneous items, item-pricing guarantees an $O(\log n)$ approximation to the optimal revenue achievable by any (buy-many) mechanism,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Shuchi Chawla , Rojin Rezvan , Yifeng Teng , Christos Tzamos

We study one-sided matching problems where $n$ agents have preferences over $m$ objects and each of them need to be assigned to at most one object. Most work on such problems assume that the agents only have ordinal preferences and usually…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Thomas Ma , Vijay Menon , Kate Larson

In the Submodular Welfare Maximization (SWM) problem, the input consists of a set of $n$ items, each of which must be allocated to one of $m$ agents. Each agent $\ell$ has a valuation function $v_\ell$, where $v_\ell(S)$ denotes the welfare…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-12-18 Nitish Korula , Vahab Mirrokni , Morteza Zadimoghaddam

Multilateral index numbers are often used to make claims about welfare, such as treating PPPs as cross-country costs of living or real incomes as indicators of living standards. However, such interpretations may not be consistent with the…

General Economics · Economics 2025-12-11 Hubert Wu

Consider an unobservable $M|G|1$ queue with preemptive-resume scheduling and two priority classes. Customers are strategic and may join the premium class for a fee. We analyze the resulting equilibrium outcomes, equilibrium stability, and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Jonathan Chamberlain , David Starobinski

In this paper, we present new results on the fair and efficient allocation of indivisible goods to agents whose preferences correspond to {\em matroid rank functions}. This is a versatile valuation class with several desirable properties…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-21 Nawal Benabbou , Mithun Chakraborty , Ayumi Igarashi , Yair Zick

In allocation problems, a given set of goods are assigned to agents in such a way that the social welfare is maximised, that is, the largest possible global worth is achieved. When goods are indivisible, it is possible to use money…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-09-14 Francesco Lupia , Angelo Mendicelli , Andrea Ribichini , Francesco Scarcello , Marco Schaerf

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2014-09-12 Aris Filos-Ratsikas , Peter Bro Miltersen

We propose a conceptual framework for counterfactual and welfare analysis for approximate models. Our key assumption is that model approximation error is the same magnitude at new choices as the observed data. Applying the framework to…

Econometrics · Economics 2020-09-09 Roy Allen , John Rehbeck

We study the problem of allocating indivisible items to budget-constrained agents, aiming to provide fairness and efficiency guarantees. Specifically, our goal is to ensure that the resulting allocation is envy-free up to any item (EFx)…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-08-04 Marius Garbea , Vasilis Gkatzelis , Xizhi Tan

For any $\varepsilon>0$, we give a simple, deterministic $(4+\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm for the Nash social welfare (NSW) problem under submodular valuations. We also consider the asymmetric variant of the problem, where the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Jugal Garg , Edin Husić , Wenzheng Li , László A. Végh , Jan Vondrák

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-03-31 Shaddin Dughmi , Bryan Wilder

We study the power and limits of optimal dynamic pricing in combinatorial markets; i.e., dynamic pricing that leads to optimal social welfare. Previous work by Cohen-Addad et al. [EC'16] demonstrated the existence of optimal dynamic prices…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Ben Berger , Alon Eden , Michal Feldman

We develop polynomial-time algorithms for the fair and efficient allocation of indivisible goods among $n$ agents that have subadditive valuations over the goods. We first consider the Nash social welfare as our objective and design a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-07-07 Siddharth Barman , Umang Bhaskar , Anand Krishna , Ranjani G. Sundaram

We analyze the run-time complexity of computing allocations that are both fair and maximize the utilitarian social welfare, defined as the sum of agents' utilities. We focus on two tractable fairness concepts: envy-freeness up to one item…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Haris Aziz , Xin Huang , Nicholas Mattei , Erel Segal-Halevi

We study the bilateral trade problem where a seller owns a single indivisible item, and a potential buyer seeks to purchase it. Previous mechanisms for this problem only considered the case where the values of the buyer and the seller are…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Shahar Dobzinski , Ariel Shaulker