Related papers: Computational Efficiency Requires Simple Taxation
Complexity theory offers a variety of concise computational models for computing boolean functions - branching programs, circuits, decision trees and ordered binary decision diagrams to name a few. A natural question that arises in this…
We consider a monopolist seller facing a single buyer with additive valuations over n heterogeneous, independent items. It is known that in this important setting optimal mechanisms may require randomization [HR12], use menus of infinite…
Consider a monopolist selling $n$ items to an additive buyer whose item values are drawn from independent distributions $F_1,F_2,\ldots,F_n$ possibly having unbounded support. Unlike in the single-item case, it is well known that the…
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…
This paper considers the design of non-truthful mechanisms from samples. We identify a parameterized family of mechanisms with strategically simple winner-pays-bid, all-pay, and truthful payment formats. In general (not necessarily…
The theory of computational complexity focuses on functions and, hence, studies programs whose interactive behavior is reduced to a simple question/answer pattern. We propose a broader theory whose ultimate goal is expressing and analyzing…
In this paper we revisit the notion of simplicity in mechanisms. We consider a seller of $m$ items, facing a single buyer with valuation $v$. We observe that previous attempts to define complexity measures often fail to classify mechanisms…
Economic complexity reflects the amount of knowledge that is embedded in the productive structure of an economy. It resides on the premise of hidden capabilities - fundamental endowments underlying the productive structure. In general,…
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…
It is well known that a game equilibrium can be far from efficient or fair, due to the misalignment between individual and social objectives. The focus of this paper is to design a new mechanism framework that induces an efficient and fair…
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 fundamental result in mechanism design theory, the so-called revelation principle, asserts that for many questions concerning the existence of mechanisms with a given outcome one can restrict attention to truthful direct…
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,…
We study a fair division problem with indivisible items, namely the computation of maximin share allocations. Given a set of $n$ players, the maximin share of a single player is the best she can guarantee to herself, if she would partition…
Task allocation is a crucial process in modern systems, but it is often challenged by incomplete information about the utilities of participating agents. In this paper, we propose a new profit maximization mechanism for the task allocation…
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…
In this work, we investigate online mechanisms for trading time-sensitive valued data. We adopt a continuous function $d(t)$ to represent the data value fluctuation over time $t$. Our objective is to design an \emph{online} mechanism…
We address the problem of fair division, or cake cutting, with the goal of finding truthful mechanisms. In the case of a general measure space ("cake") and non-atomic, additive individual preference measures - or utilities - we show that…
Let $(f,P)$ be an incentive compatible mechanism where $f$ is the social choice function and $P$ is the payment function. In many important settings, $f$ uniquely determines $P$ (up to a constant) and therefore a common approach is to focus…
While concepts and tools from Theoretical Computer Science are regularly applied to, and significantly support, software development for discrete problems, Numerical Engineering largely employs recipes and methods whose correctness and…