Related papers: Willy Wonka Mechanisms
This paper revisits the classic instrument choice problem in a setting with consumption externalities, through the lens of robust mechanism design. A regulator can implement any incentive-compatible policy but is uncertain about how…
The auction theory literature has so far focused mostly on the design of mechanisms that takes the revenue or the efficiency as a yardstick. However, scenarios where the {\it capacity}, which we define as \textit{``the number of bidders the…
Using AI approaches to automatically design mechanisms has been a central research mission at the interface of AI and economics [Conitzer and Sandholm, 2002]. Previous approaches that attempt to design revenue optimal auctions for the…
We present a recommender system based on the Random Utility Model. Online shoppers are modeled as rational decision makers with limited information, and the recommendation task is formulated as the problem of optimally enriching the…
We study Bayesian mechanism design problems in settings where agents have budgets. Specifically, an agent's utility for an outcome is given by his value for the outcome minus any payment he makes to the mechanism, as long as the payment is…
We consider the problem of an auctioneer who faces the task of selling a good (drawn from a known distribution) to a set of buyers, when the auctioneer does not have the capacity to describe to the buyers the exact identity of the good that…
In this work we are concerned with the design of efficient mechanisms while eliciting limited information from the agents. First, we study the performance of sampling approximations in facility location games. Our key result is to show that…
We investigate the problem of designing randomized obviously strategy-proof (OSP) mechanisms in several canonical auction settings. Obvious strategy-proofness, introduced by Li [American Economic Review, 2017], strengthens the well-known…
Mechanism design, a branch of economics, aims to design rules that can autonomously achieve desired outcomes in resource allocation and public decision making. The research on mechanism design using machine learning is called automated…
The Probabilistic Serial mechanism is well-known for its desirable fairness and efficiency properties. It is one of the most prominent protocols for the random assignment problem. However, Probabilistic Serial is not incentive-compatible,…
We consider incentive compatible mechanisms for a domain that is very close to the domain of scheduling $n$ unrelated machines: the single exception is that the valuation of just one machine is submodular. For the scheduling problem with…
Online platforms in the Internet Economy commonly incorporate recommender systems that recommend products (or "arms") to users (or "agents"). A key challenge in this domain arises from myopic agents who are naturally incentivized to exploit…
Algorithmic decision making systems are ubiquitous across a wide variety of online as well as offline services. These systems rely on complex learning methods and vast amounts of data to optimize the service functionality, satisfaction of…
We study how to optimally design selection mechanisms, accounting for agents' investment incentives. A principal wishes to allocate a resource of homogeneous quality to a heterogeneous population of agents. The principal commits to a…
A fundamental result in mechanism design theory, the so-called revelation principle, asserts that for many questions concerning the existence of mechanisms with a given outcome one can restrict attention to truthful direct…
Consider a barter exchange problem over a finite set of agents, where each agent owns an item and is also associated with a (privately known) wish list of items belonging to the other agents. An outcome of the problem is a (re)allocation of…
Using mechanised reasoning we prove that combinatorial Vickrey auctions are soundly specified in that they associate a unique outcome (allocation and transfers) to any valid input (bids). Having done so, we auto-generate verified executable…
There has been much recent work on the revenue-raising properties of truthful mechanisms for selling goods to selfish bidders. Typically the revenue of a mechanism is compared against a benchmark (such as, the maximum revenue obtainable by…
A seller wants to sell a good to a set of bidders using a credible mechanism. We show that when the seller has private information about her cost, it is impossible for a static mechanism to achieve the optimal revenue. In particular, even…
We apply control theoretic and optimization techniques to adaptively design incentives. In particular, we consider the problem of a planner with an objective that depends on data from strategic decision makers. The planner does not know the…