Related papers: Willy Wonka Mechanisms
Multi-item revenue-optimal mechanisms are known to be extremely complex, often offering buyers randomized lotteries of goods. In the standard buy-one model, it is known that optimal mechanisms can yield revenue infinitely higher than that…
Multi-item mechanisms can be very complex offering many different bundles to the buyer that could even be randomized. Such complexity is thought to be necessary as the revenue gaps between randomized and deterministic mechanisms, or…
Intelligent physical systems as embodied cognitive systems must perform high-level reasoning while concurrently managing an underlying control architecture. The link between cognition and control must manage the problem of converting…
A rich class of mechanism design problems can be understood as incomplete-information games between a principal who commits to a policy and an agent who responds, with payoffs determined by an unknown state of the world. Traditionally,…
LLM-based agents increasingly coordinate decisions in multi-agent systems, often attaching natural-language reasoning to actions. However, reasoning is neither free nor automatically reliable: it incurs computational cost and, without…
We consider budget feasible mechanisms for procurement auctions with additive valuation functions. For the divisible case, where agents can be allocated fractionally, there exists an optimal mechanism with approximation guarantee $e/(e-1)$…
Internet ad auctions have evolved from a few lines of text to richer informational layouts that include images, sitelinks, videos, etc. Ads in these new formats occupy varying amounts of space, and an advertiser can provide multiple…
We study the design of efficient mechanisms under asymmetric awareness and information. Unawareness refers to the lack of conception rather than the lack of information. Assuming quasi-linear utilities and private values, we show that we…
Modeling the purposeful behavior of imperfect agents from a small number of observations is a challenging task. When restricted to the single-agent decision-theoretic setting, inverse optimal control techniques assume that observed behavior…
We study a novel class of mechanism design problems in which the outcomes are constrained by the payments. This basic class of mechanism design problems captures many common economic situations, and yet it has not been studied, to our…
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 the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…
In modern advertising platforms, learning algorithms are deployed by budget-constrained bidders to maximize their accumulated value. These algorithms often offer classical utility guarantees like no-regret, i.e., the agent's utility is at…
We investigate mechanism design without payments when agents have different types of preferences. Contrary to most settings in the literature where agents have the same preference, e.g. in the facility location games all agents would like…
This letter considers the design of an auction mechanism to sell the object of a seller when the buyers quantize their private value estimates regarding the object prior to communicating them to the seller. The designed auction mechanism…
Many real-world systems such as taxi systems, traffic networks and smart grids involve self-interested actors that perform individual tasks in a shared environment. However, in such systems, the self-interested behaviour of agents produces…
In many social computing applications such as online Q&A forums, the best contribution for each task receives some high reward, while all remaining contributions receive an identical, lower reward irrespective of their actual qualities.…
We investigate the possibility of an incentive-compatible (IC, a.k.a. strategy-proof) mechanism for the classification of agents in a network according to their reviews of each other. In the $ \alpha $-classification problem we are…
As computational agents are developed for increasingly complicated e-commerce applications, the complexity of the decisions they face demands advances in artificial intelligence techniques. For example, an agent representing a seller in an…
It is widely believed that computing payments needed to induce truthful bidding is somehow harder than simply computing the allocation. We show that the opposite is true: creating a randomized truthful mechanism is essentially as easy as a…