Related papers: Tractable mechanisms for computing near-optimal ut…
We consider the problem of locating a facility to serve a set of agents located along a line. The Nash welfare objective function, defined as the product of the agents' utilities, is known to provide a compromise between fairness and…
We consider a multi-agent resource allocation setting that models the assignment of papers to reviewers. A recurring issue in allocation problems is the compatibility of welfare/efficiency and fairness. Given an oracle to find a…
The emergence of new communication technologies allows us to expand our understanding of distributed control and consider collaborative decision-making paradigms. With collaborative algorithms, certain local decision-making entities (or…
This paper addresses information-based sensing point selection from a set of possible sensing locations, which determines a set of measurement points maximizing the mutual information between the sensor measurements and the variables of…
Given a set of $m$ agents and a set of $n$ items, where agent $A$ has utility $u_{A,i}$ for item $i$, our goal is to allocate items to agents to maximize fairness. Specifically, the utility of an agent is the sum of its utilities for items…
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…
We consider ordinal approximation algorithms for a broad class of utility maximization problems for multi-agent systems. In these problems, agents have utilities for connecting to each other, and the goal is to compute a maximum-utility…
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…
This paper considers the optimization-based traffic allocation problem among multiple end points in connectionless networks. The network utility function is modeled as a non-concave function, since it is the best description of the quality…
We consider the problem of repeatedly choosing policies to maximize social welfare. Welfare is a weighted sum of private utility and public revenue. Earlier outcomes inform later policies. Utility is not observed, but indirectly inferred.…
We study the efficiency guarantees in the simple auction environment where the auctioneer has one unit of divisible good to be distributed among a number of budget constrained agents. With budget constraints, the social welfare cannot be…
We study the relationship between two central concepts in the allocation of divisible goods: competitive equilibrium (CE) and allocations that maximize Nash welfare, i.e., allocations where the weighted geometric mean of the utilities is…
We consider the bilateral trade problem, in which two agents trade a single indivisible item. It is known that the only dominant-strategy truthful mechanism is the fixed-price mechanism: given commonly known distributions of the buyer's…
A number of prototypical optimization problems in multi-agent systems (e.g., task allocation and network load-sharing) exhibit a highly local structure: that is, each agent's decision variables are only directly coupled to few other agent's…
We study the efficiency of mechanisms for allocating a divisible resource. Given scalar signals submitted by all users, such a mechanism decides the fraction of the resource that each user will receive and a payment that will be collected…
This paper focuses on the coordination of a large population of dynamic agents with private information over multiple periods. Each agent maximizes the individual utility, while the coordinator determines the market rule to achieve group…
The distributed non-smooth resource allocation problem over multi-agent networks is studied in this paper, where each agent is subject to globally coupled network resource constraints and local feasibility constraints described in terms of…
We study the allocation of indivisible items that form an undirected graph and investigate the worst-case welfare loss when requiring that each agent must receive a connected subgraph. Our focus is on both egalitarian and utilitarian…
Given an initial resource allocation, where some agents may envy others or where a different distribution of resources might lead to higher social welfare, our goal is to improve the allocation without reassigning resources. We consider a…
According to the proportional allocation mechanism from the network optimization literature, users compete for a divisible resource -- such as bandwidth -- by submitting bids. The mechanism allocates to each user a fraction of the resource…