Related papers: Optimizing over Serial Dictatorships
Serial dictatorship is a simple mechanism for coordinating agents in solving combinatorial optimization problems according to their preferences. The most representative such problem is one-sided matching, in which a set of n agents have…
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…
When allocating indivisible items to agents, it is known that the only strategyproof mechanisms that satisfy a set of rather mild conditions are constrained serial dictatorships: given a fixed order over agents, at each step the designated…
In priority-based matching, serial dictatorship (SD) is simple, strategyproof, and Pareto efficient, but not free of justified envy (i.e. fair). This paper studies how to fairly order agents in SD as a function of their priorities. I show…
We consider a simple sequential allocation procedure for sharing indivisible items between agents in which agents take turns to pick items. Supposing additive utilities and independence between the agents, we show that the expected utility…
We study the efficiency (in terms of social welfare) of truthful and symmetric mechanisms in one-sided matching problems with {\em dichotomous preferences} and {\em normalized von Neumann-Morgenstern preferences}. We are particularly…
Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The…
Sequential allocation is a simple and widely studied mechanism to allocate indivisible items in turns to agents according to a pre-specified picking sequence of agents. At each turn, the current agent in the picking sequence picks its most…
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 study the assignment problem of objects to agents with heterogeneous preferences under distributional constraints. Each agent is associated with a publicly known type and has a private ordinal ranking over objects. We are interested in…
Consider a university assigning students to courses and dorms. While many mechanisms are available, they each have their own drawbacks. Running serial dictatorship once for all goods is highly unfair, but running serial dictatorship…
We make a detailed analysis of three key algorithms (Serial Dictatorship and the naive and adaptive variants of the Boston algorithm) for the housing allocation problem, under the assumption that agent preferences are chosen iid uniformly…
We study the power of item-pricing as a tool for approximately optimizing social welfare in a combinatorial market. We consider markets with $m$ indivisible items and $n$ buyers. The goal is to set prices to the items so that, when agents…
We introduce a novel model of contracts with combinatorial actions that accounts for sequential and adaptive agent behavior. As in the standard model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly project to an agent. There are $n$…
In a combinatorial auction with item bidding, agents participate in multiple single-item second-price auctions at once. As some items might be substitutes, agents need to strategize in order to maximize their utilities. A number of results…
Voting and assignment are two of the most fundamental settings in social choice theory. For both settings, random serial dictatorship (RSD) is a well-known rule that satisfies anonymity, ex post efficiency, and strategyproofness. Recently,…
Sequential allocation is a simple and attractive mechanism for the allocation of indivisible goods. Agents take turns, according to a policy, to pick items. Sequential allocation is guaranteed to return an allocation which is efficient but…
This paper studies algorithmic decision-making in the presence of strategic individual behaviors, where an ML model is used to make decisions about human agents and the latter can adapt their behavior strategically to improve their future…
We study the truthful facility assignment problem, where a set of agents with private most-preferred points on a metric space are assigned to facilities that lie on the metric space, under capacity constraints on the facilities. The goal is…
In several socioeconomic-critical decision-making settings, such as fair resource allocation, climate policy, or AI alignment, multiple principals interact within a common arena. While it is well established that these principals may have…