Related papers: Willy Wonka Mechanisms
In many settings, money is a tool of exchange with minimal inherent utility --- agents will spend it in a way that maximizes the value of goods received subject to reasonable constraints, giving only second-order consideration to the…
The dominant theories of rational choice assume logical omniscience. That is, they assume that when facing a decision problem, an agent can perform all relevant computations and determine the truth value of all relevant logical/mathematical…
Standard rational actor models often attribute cooperation failures in social dilemmas to insufficient incentives, overlooking the destabilizing effects of continuous utility maximization. To address this, we propose a framework of ``will"…
We study a multi-round welfare-maximising mechanism design problem in instances where agents do not know their values. On each round, a mechanism first assigns an allocation each to a set of agents and charges them a price; at the end of…
Budget-feasible procurement has been a major paradigm in mechanism design since its introduction by Singer (2010). An auctioneer (buyer) with a strict budget constraint is interested in buying goods or services from a group of strategic…
Mechanism design is now a standard tool in computer science for aligning the incentives of self-interested agents with the objectives of a system designer. There is, however, a fundamental disconnect between the traditional application…
Mechanisms such as auctions and pricing schemes are utilized to design strategic (noncooperative) games for networked systems. Although the participating players are selfish, these mechanisms ensure that the game outcome is optimal with…
Good economic mechanisms depend on the preferences of participants in the mechanism. For example, the revenue-optimal auction for selling an item is parameterized by a reserve price, and the appropriate reserve price depends on how much the…
In mechanism design it is typical to impose incentive compatibility and then derive an optimal mechanism subject to this constraint. By replacing the incentive compatibility requirement with the goal of minimizing expected ex post regret,…
The design of algorithms or protocols that are able to align the goals of the planner with the selfish interests of the agents involved in these protocols is of paramount importance in almost every decentralized setting (such as, computer…
We study individual rational, Pareto optimal, and incentive compatible mechanisms for auctions with heterogeneous items and budget limits. For multi-dimensional valuations we show that there can be no deterministic mechanism with these…
We study black-box reductions from mechanism design to algorithm design for welfare maximization in settings of incomplete information. Given oracle access to an algorithm for an underlying optimization problem, the goal is to simulate an…
Since its inception, artificial intelligence has relied upon a theoretical foundation centered around perfect rationality as the desired property of intelligent systems. We argue, as others have done, that this foundation is inadequate…
We study allocation mechanisms that utilize costly signaling as a screening tool. A social planner aims to maximize social welfare, defined as the weighted sum of agents' utilities, while implementing a specific allocation rule. Within a…
Selective rationalization has become a common mechanism to ensure that predictive models reveal how they use any available features. The selection may be soft or hard, and identifies a subset of input features relevant for prediction. The…
We consider the fundamental problem of designing a truthful single-item auction with the challenging objective of extracting a large fraction of the highest agent valuation as revenue. Following a recent trend in algorithm design, we assume…
When robots share the same workspace with other intelligent agents (e.g., other robots or humans), they must be able to reason about the behaviors of their neighboring agents while accomplishing the designated tasks. In practice,…
A major achievement of mechanism design theory is a general method for the construction of truthful mechanisms called VCG (Vickrey, Clarke, Groves). When applying this method to complex problems such as combinatorial auctions, a difficulty…
Most of the work in the auction design literature assumes that bidders behave rationally based on the information available for every individual auction, and the revelation principle enables designers to restrict their efforts to incentive…
Wagering mechanisms are one-shot betting mechanisms that elicit agents' predictions of an event. For deterministic wagering mechanisms, an existing impossibility result has shown incompatibility of some desirable theoretical properties. In…