Related papers: When Are Welfare Guarantees Robust?
In settings where players have a limited access to liquidity, represented in the form of budget constraints, efficiency maximization has proven to be a challenging goal. In particular, the social welfare cannot be approximated by a better…
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…
We consider the optimization problem of a multi-resource, multi-unit VCG auction that produces an optimal, i.e., non-approximated, social welfare. We present an algorithm that solves this optimization problem with pseudo-polynomial…
We provide a reduction from revenue maximization to welfare maximization in multi-dimensional Bayesian auctions with arbitrary (possibly combinatorial) feasibility constraints and independent bidders with arbitrary (possibly combinatorial)…
When agents with independent priors bid for a single item, Myerson's optimal auction maximizes expected revenue, whereas Vickrey's second-price auction optimizes social welfare. We address the natural question of trade-offs between the two…
Consider the seller's problem of finding optimal prices for her $n$ (divisible) goods when faced with a set of $m$ consumers, given that she can only observe their purchased bundles at posted prices, i.e., revealed preferences. We study…
Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The…
We study autobidding ad auctions with user costs, where each bidder is value-maximizing subject to a return-over-investment (ROI) constraint, and the seller aims to maximize the social welfare taking into consideration the user's cost of…
Budget-feasible procurement auctions play a pivotal role in various AI-driven marketplaces, such as data acquisition and crowdsourcing, where a buyer with a limited budget seeks to procure services from strategic sellers with private costs.…
We study mechanism design problems in the {\em ordinal setting} wherein the preferences of agents are described by orderings over outcomes, as opposed to specific numerical values associated with them. This setting is relevant when agents…
We examine the complexity of computing welfare- and revenue-maximizing equilibria in autobidding second-price auctions subject to return-on-spend (RoS) constraints. We show that computing an autobidding equilibrium that approximates the…
The simultaneous multiple-round auction (SMRA) and the combinatorial clock auction (CCA) are the two primary mechanisms used to sell bandwidth. Under truthful bidding, the SMRA is known to output a Walrasian equilibrium that maximizes…
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 explore the approximation power of deterministic obviously strategy-proof mechanisms in auctions, where the objective is welfare maximization. A trivial ascending auction on the grand bundle guarantees an approximation of $\min\{m,n\}$…
Consider a setting where selfish agents are to be assigned to coalitions or projects from a fixed set P. Each project k is characterized by a valuation function; v_k(S) is the value generated by a set S of agents working on project k. We…
From social networks to supply chains, more and more aspects of how humans, firms and organizations interact is mediated by artificial learning agents. As the influence of machine learning systems grows, it is paramount that we study how to…
In a combinatorial auction with item bidding, agents participate in multiple single-item second-price auctions at once. As some items might be substitutes, agents need to strategize in order to maximize their utilities. A number of results…
A principal delegates a project to a team $S$ from a pool of $n$ agents. The project's value if all agents in $S$ exert costly effort is $f(S)$. To incentivize the agents to participate, the principal assigns each agent $i\in S$ a share…
We consider the Arrow--Debreu exchange market model under the assumption that the agents' demands satisfy the weak gross substitutes (WGS) property. We present a simple auction algorithm that obtains an approximate market equilibrium for…
This paper proves that the welfare of the first price auction in Bayes-Nash equilibrium is at least a $.743$-fraction of the welfare of the optimal mechanism assuming agents' values are independently distributed. The previous best bound was…