Related papers: On the Nisan-Ronen conjecture for submodular valua…
We study a class of procurement auctions with a budget constraint, where an auctioneer is interested in buying resources or services from a set of agents. Ideally, the auctioneer would like to select a subset of the resources so as to…
Budget feasible mechanisms, recently initiated by Singer (FOCS 2010), extend algorithmic mechanism design problems to a realistic setting with a budget constraint. We consider the problem of designing truthful budget feasible mechanisms for…
We study a novel class of mechanism design problems in which the outcomes are constrained by the payments. This basic class of mechanism design problems captures many common economic situations, and yet it has not been studied, to our…
We extend the work of Narasimhan and Bilmes [30] for minimizing set functions representable as a difference between submodular functions. Similar to [30], our new algorithms are guaranteed to monotonically reduce the objective function at…
Budget feasible mechanism considers algorithmic mechanism design questions where there is a budget constraint on the total payment of the mechanism. An important question in the field is that under which valuation domains there exist budget…
We extend the work of Narasimhan and Bilmes [30] for minimizing set functions representable as a dierence between submodular functions. Similar to [30], our new algorithms are guaranteed to monotonically reduce the objective function at…
We investigate the possibility of an incentive-compatible (IC, a.k.a. strategy-proof) mechanism for the classification of agents in a network according to their reviews of each other. In the $ \alpha $-classification problem we are…
The framework of budget-feasible mechanism design studies procurement auctions where the auctioneer (buyer) aims to maximize his valuation function subject to a hard budget constraint. We study the problem of designing truthful mechanisms…
We present and discuss general techniques for proving inapproximability results for truthful mechanisms. We make use of these techniques to prove lower bounds on the approximability of several non-utilitarian multi-parameter problems. In…
Noam Nisan and Amir Ronen conjectured that the best approximation ratio of deterministic truthful mechanisms for makespan-minimization for $n$ unrelated machines is $n$. This work validates the conjecture.
In machine learning and big data, the optimization objectives based on set-cover, entropy, diversity, influence, feature selection, etc. are commonly modeled as submodular functions. Submodular (function) maximization is generally NP-hard,…
In this paper, we investigate a class of submodular problems which in general are very hard. These include minimizing a submodular cost function under combinatorial constraints, which include cuts, matchings, paths, etc., optimizing a…
We study the problem of a budget limited buyer who wants to buy a set of items, each from a different seller, to maximize her value. The budget feasible mechanism design problem aims to design a mechanism which incentivizes the sellers to…
Constrained submodular maximization has been extensively studied in the recent years. In this paper, we study adaptive robust optimization with nearly submodular structure (ARONSS). Our objective is to randomly select a subset of items that…
Submodular function minimization is well studied, and existing algorithms solve it exactly or up to arbitrary accuracy. However, in many applications, such as structured sparse learning or batch Bayesian optimization, the objective function…
In mechanism design it is typical to impose incentive compatibility and then derive an optimal mechanism subject to this constraint. By replacing the incentive compatibility requirement with the goal of minimizing expected ex post regret,…
We study revenue maximization in a buyer-seller setting where the seller has a single object and the buyer has both a private valuation and a private budget. Private budgets complicate the classic single-product monopoly problem, making…
We investigate the continuous non-monotone DR-submodular maximization problem subject to a down-closed convex solvable constraint. Our first contribution is to construct an example to demonstrate that (first-order) stationary points can…
We study the problem of truthfully scheduling $m$ tasks to $n$ selfish unrelated machines, under the objective of makespan minimization, as was introduced in the seminal work of Nisan and Ronen [STOC'99]. Closing the current gap of…
We provide a computationally efficient black-box reduction from mechanism design to algorithm design in very general settings. Specifically, we give an approximation-preserving reduction from truthfully maximizing \emph{any} objective under…