Related papers: Mechanisms for Trading Durable Goods
We consider the problem of selling perishable items to a stream of buyers in order to maximize social welfare. A seller starts with a set of identical items, and each arriving buyer wants any one item, and has a valuation drawn i.i.d. from…
In many large scale distributed systems and on the web, agents need to interact with other unknown agents to carry out some tasks or transactions. The ability to reason about and assess the potential risks in carrying out such transactions…
A recent line of work in mechanism design has focused on guaranteeing incentive compatibility for agents without contingent reasoning skills: obviously strategyproof mechanisms guarantee that it is "obvious" for these imperfectly rational…
State of the art reinforcement learning has enabled training agents on tasks of ever increasing complexity. However, the current paradigm tends to favor training agents from scratch on every new task or on collections of tasks with a view…
This paper considers a scenario within the field of mechanism design without money where a mechanism designer is interested in selecting items with maximum total value under a knapsack constraint. The items, however, are controlled by…
We investigate how to model exchangeability with choice functions. Exchangeability is a structural assessment on a sequence of uncertain variables. We show how such assessments are a special indifference assessment, and how that leads to a…
We consider a repeated auction where the buyer's utility for an item depends on the time that elapsed since his last purchase. We present an algorithm to build the optimal bidding policy, and then, because optimal might be impractical, we…
We study the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods and chores under category constraints. Specifically, there are $n$ agents and $m$ indivisible items which are partitioned into categories with associated capacities. An allocation…
We study the problem of learning shared structure \emph{across} a sequence of dynamic pricing experiments for related products. We consider a practical formulation where the unknown demand parameters for each product come from an unknown…
Severe impossibility results restrict the design of strategyproof random assignment mechanisms, and trade-offs are necessary when aiming for more demanding efficiency requirements, such as ordinal or rank efficiency. We introduce hybrid…
We study a fair division model where indivisible items arrive sequentially, and must be allocated immediately and irrevocably. Previous work on online fair division has shown impossibility results in achieving approximate envy-freeness…
We investigate the tradeoffs between fairness and efficiency when allocating indivisible items over time. Suppose T items arrive over time and must be allocated upon arrival, immediately and irrevocably, to one of n agents. Agent i assigns…
Artifact systems are a novel paradigm for specifying and implementing business processes described in terms of interacting modules called artifacts. Artifacts consist of data and lifecycles, accounting respectively for the relational…
Exploration and adaptation to new tasks in a transfer learning setup is a central challenge in reinforcement learning. In this work, we build on the idea of modeling a distribution over policies in a Bayesian deep reinforcement learning…
Exchangeability is a central notion in statistics and probability theory. The assumption that an infinite sequence of data points is exchangeable is at the core of Bayesian statistics. However, finite exchangeability as a statistical…
Understanding emerging behaviors of reinforcement learning (RL) agents may be difficult since such agents are often trained in complex environments using highly complex decision making procedures. This has given rise to a variety of…
We study a fair division problem with indivisible items, namely the computation of maximin share allocations. Given a set of $n$ players, the maximin share of a single player is the best she can guarantee to herself, if she would partition…
We study consumption behaviour in systems with heterogeneous interacting agents. Two different models are introduced, respectively with long and short range interactions among agents. At any time step an agent decides whether or not to…
We prove that no fully transactional system can provide fast read transactions (including read-only ones that are considered the most frequent in practice). Specifically, to achieve fast read transactions, the system has to give up support…
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…