Related papers: The Probabilistic Serial and Random Priority Mecha…
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…
Obviously strategyproof (OSP) mechanisms maintain the incentive compatibility of agents that are not fully rational. They have been object of a number of studies since their recent definition. A research agenda, initiated in…
Social networks are increasingly being used to conduct polls. We introduce a simple model of such social polling. We suppose agents vote sequentially, but the order in which agents choose to vote is not necessarily fixed. We also suppose…
Random serial dictatorship (RSD) is a randomized assignment rule that - given a set of $n$ agents with strict preferences over $n$ houses - satisfies equal treatment of equals, ex post efficiency, and strategyproofness. For $n \le 3$,…
In many applications such as rationing medical care and supplies, university admissions, and the assignment of public housing, the decision of who receives an allocation can be justified by various normative criteria. Such settings have…
We determine the quality of randomized social choice mechanisms in a setting in which the agents have metric preferences: every agent has a cost for each alternative, and these costs form a metric. We assume that these costs are unknown to…
The sequential allocation protocol is a simple and popular mechanism to allocate indivisible goods, in which the agents take turns to pick the items according to a predefined sequence. While this protocol is not strategy-proof, it has been…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
We study the classic problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among a group of agents, and focus on the notion of approximate proportionality known as PROPm. Prior work showed that there exists an allocation that satisfies…
In social choice settings with linear preferences, random dictatorship is known to be the only social decision scheme satisfying strategyproofness and ex post efficiency. When also allowing indifferences, random serial dictatorship (RSD) is…
We study a setting in which a principal selects an agent to execute a collection of tasks according to a specified priority sequence. Agents, however, have their own individual priority sequences according to which they wish to execute the…
We consider the problem of fairly and efficiently allocating indivisible items (goods or bads) under capacity constraints. In this setting, we are given a set of categorized items. Each category has a capacity constraint (the same for all…
In the assignment problem, the goal is to assign indivisible items to agents who have ordinal preferences, efficiently and fairly, in a strategyproof manner. In practice, first-choice maximality, i.e., assigning a maximal number of agents…
We consider the assignment problem, where $n$ agents have to be matched to $n$ items. Each agent has a preference order over the items. In the serial dictatorship (SD) mechanism the agents act in a particular order and pick their most…
In the random assignment problem, objects are randomly assigned to agents keeping in view the agents' preferences over objects. A random assignment specifies the probability of an agent getting an object. We examine the structural and…
In fair division of indivisible goods, using sequences of sincere choices (or picking sequences) is a natural way to allocate the objects. The idea is the following: at each stage, a designated agent picks one object among those that…
We consider the problem of allocating indivisible objects to agents when agents have strict preferences over objects. There are inherent trade-offs between competing notions of efficiency, fairness and incentives in assignment mechanisms.…
We introduce a novel family of mechanisms for constrained allocation problems which we call local priority mechanisms. These mechanisms are parameterized by a function which assigns a set of agents, the local compromisers, to every…
A principal must decide between two options. Which one she prefers depends on the private information of two agents. One agent always prefers the first option; the other always prefers the second. Transfers are infeasible. One application…
In this note, we prove two new impossibility results for random assignment mechanisms: Bogomolnaia and Moulin (2001) showed that no assignment mechanism can satisfy strategyproofness, ordinal efficiency, and symmetry at the same time, and…