Related papers: Willy Wonka Mechanisms
One of the main challenges in mechanism design is to carefully engineer incentives ensuring truthfulness while maintaining strong social welfare approximation guarantees. But these objectives are often in conflict, making it impossible to…
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…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
In the problem of allocating a single non-disposable commodity among agents whose preferences are single-peaked, we study a weakening of strategy-proofness called not obvious manipulability (NOM). If agents are cognitively limited, then NOM…
We study mechanism design when agents may have hidden secondary goals which will manifest as non-trivial preferences among outcomes for which their primary utility is the same. We show that in such cases, a mechanism is robust against…
An indivisible object may be sold to one of $n$ agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the valuations' distribution is scarce: she knows only the…
Auctions in which agents' payoffs are random variables have received increased attention in recent years. In particular, recent work in algorithmic mechanism design has produced mechanisms employing internal randomization, partly in…
A growing body of work in economics and computation focuses on the trade-off between implementability and simplicity in mechanism design. The goal is to develop a theory that not only allows to design an incentive structure easy to grasp…
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…
Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major…
We study a mechanism-design problem in which spiteful agents strive to not only maximize their rewards but also, contingent upon their own payoff levels, seek to lower the opponents' rewards. We characterize all individually rational (IR)…
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 study mechanism design problems in the {\em ordinal setting} wherein the preferences of agents are described by orderings over outcomes, as opposed to specific numerical values associated with them. This setting is relevant when agents…
Mechanism design is addressed in the context of fair allocations of indivisible goods with monetary compensation. Motivated by a real-world social choice problem, mechanisms with verification are considered in a setting where (i) agents'…
In this work, we consider the design of Non-Obviously Manipulable (NOM) mechanisms, mechanisms that bounded rational agents may fail to recognize as manipulable, for two relevant classes of succinctly representable Hedonic Games: Additively…
In this paper, we consider a general distributed system with multiple agents who select and then implement actions in the system. The system has an operator with a centralized objective. The agents, on the other hand, are selfinterested and…
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 problem of designing optimal auctions under restrictions on the set of permissible allocations. In addition to allowing us to restrict to deterministic mechanisms, we can also indirectly model non-additive valuations. We prove…
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…
We present a number of models for the adword auctions used for pricing advertising slots on search engines such as Google, Yahoo! etc. We begin with a general problem formulation which allows the privately known valuation per click to be a…