Related papers: When Are Welfare Guarantees Robust?
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…
We consider design of monetary mechanisms for two-sided matching. Mechanisms in the tradition of the deferred acceptance algorithm, even in variants incorporating money, tend to focus on the criterion of stability. Instead, in this work we…
Research on promoting cooperation among autonomous, self-regarding agents has often focused on the bi-objective optimisation problem: minimising the total incentive cost while maximising the frequency of cooperation. However, the optimal…
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…
We study the combinatorial contracting problem of D\"utting et al. [FOCS '21], in which a principal seeks to incentivize an agent to take a set of costly actions. In their model, there is a binary outcome (the agent can succeed or fail),…
Recently, a randomized mechanism has been discovered [Dughmi, Roughgarden and Yan; STOC'11] for combinatorial auctions that is truthful in expectation and guarantees a (1-1/e)-approximation to the optimal social welfare when players have…
Recent empirical work demonstrates that online advertisement can exhibit bias in the delivery of ads across users even when all advertisers bid in a non-discriminatory manner. We study the design of ad auctions that, given fair bids, are…
We present a new type of monotone submodular functions: \emph{multi-peak submodular functions}. Roughly speaking, given a family of sets $\cF$, we construct a monotone submodular function $f$ with a high value $f(S)$ for every set $S \in…
We study coverage problems in which, for a set of agents and a given threshold $T$, the goal is to select $T$ subsets (of the agents) that, while satisfying combinatorial constraints, achieve fair and efficient coverage among the agents. In…
We study \emph{combinatorial procurement auctions}, where a buyer with a valuation function $v$ and budget $B$ wishes to buy a set of items. Each item $i$ has a cost $c_i$ and the buyer is interested in a set $S$ that maximizes $v(S)$…
We study combinatorial auctions with interdependent valuations. In such settings, each agent $i$ has a private signal $s_i$ that captures her private information, and the valuation function of every agent depends on the entire signal…
Combinatorial auctions (CA) are a well-studied area in algorithmic mechanism design. However, contrary to the standard model, empirical studies suggest that a bidder's valuation often does not depend solely on the goods assigned to him. For…
Civic Crowdfunding (CC) uses the ``power of the crowd'' to garner contributions towards public projects. As these projects are non-excludable, agents may prefer to ``free-ride,'' resulting in the project not being funded. For single project…
A line of recent work provides welfare guarantees of simple combinatorial auction formats, such as selling m items via simultaneous second price auctions (SiSPAs) (Christodoulou et al. 2008, Bhawalkar and Roughgarden 2011, Feldman et al.…
Online advertising channels have commonly focused on maximizing total advertiser value (or welfare) to enhance long-run retention and channel healthiness. Previous literature has studied auction design by incorporating machine learning…
What fraction of the potential social surplus in an environment can be extracted by a revenue-maximizing monopolist? We investigate this problem in Bayesian single-parameter environments with independent private values. The precise answer…
An overview of different variants of the submodular welfare maximization problem in combinatorial auctions. In particular, I studied the existing algorithmic and game theoretic results for submodular welfare maximization problem and its…
We consider auctions in which greedy algorithms, paired with first-price or critical-price payment rules, are used to resolve multi-parameter combinatorial allocation problems. We study the price of anarchy for social welfare in such…
We study large markets with a single seller which can produce many types of goods, and many multi-minded buyers. The seller chooses posted prices for its many items, and the buyers purchase bundles to maximize their utility. For this…
If a two-player social welfare maximization problem does not admit a PTAS, we prove that any maximal-in-range truthful mechanism that runs in polynomial time cannot achieve an approximation factor better than 1/2. Moreover, for the k-player…