Related papers: Settling the Communication Complexity of VCG-based…
Budget-feasible procurement auctions play a pivotal role in various AI-driven marketplaces, such as data acquisition and crowdsourcing, where a buyer with a limited budget seeks to procure services from strategic sellers with private costs.…
We study auctions with severe bounds on the communication allowed: each bidder may only transmit t bits of information to the auctioneer. We consider both welfare- and profit-maximizing auctions under this communication restriction. For…
We consider the problem of a revenue-maximizing seller with m items for sale to n additive bidders with hard budget constraints, assuming that the seller has some prior distribution over bidder values and budgets. The prior may be…
State-of-the-art posted-price mechanisms for submodular bidders with $m$ items achieve approximation guarantees of $O((\log \log m)^3)$ [Assadi and Singla, 2019]. Their truthfulness, however, requires bidders to compute an NP-hard…
Many auction settings implicitly or explicitly require that bidders are treated equally ex-ante. This may be because discrimination is philosophically or legally impermissible, or because it is practically difficult to implement or…
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…
Algorithmic mechanism design (AMD) studies the delicate interplay between computational efficiency, truthfulness, and optimality. We focus on AMD's paradigmatic problem: combinatorial auctions. We present a new generalization of the VC…
Complements between goods - where one good takes on added value in the presence of another - have been a thorn in the side of algorithmic mechanism designers. On the one hand, complements are common in the standard motivating applications…
This survey outlines a general and modular theory for proving approximation guarantees for equilibria of auctions in complex settings. This theory complements traditional economic techniques, which generally focus on exact and optimal…
We study the problem of multi-dimensional revenue maximization when selling $m$ items to a buyer that has additive valuations for them, drawn from a (possibly correlated) prior distribution. Unlike traditional Bayesian auction design, we…
We study the communication complexity of dominant strategy implementations of combinatorial auctions. We start with two domains that are generally considered "easy": multi-unit auctions with decreasing marginal values and combinatorial…
We present an incentive-compatible polynomial-time approximation scheme for multi-unit auctions with general k-minded player valuations. The mechanism fully optimizes over an appropriately chosen sub-range of possible allocations and then…
Submodular over signal (SOS) defines a family of interesting functions for which there exist truthful mechanisms with constant approximation to the social welfare for agents with interdependent valuations. The best-known truthful auction is…
We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…
The focus of classic mechanism design has been on truthful direct-revelation mechanisms. In the context of combinatorial auctions the truthful direct-revelation mechanism that maximizes social welfare is the VCG mechanism. For many…
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 $e/(e-1)$…
We study a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: constructing truthful mechanisms for welfare maximization in combinatorial auctions with submodular bidders. Dobzinski, Nisan, and Schapira provided the first mechanism that…
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
The existence of incentive-compatible computationally-efficient protocols for combinatorial auctions with decent approximation ratios is the paradigmatic problem in computational mechanism design. It is believed that in many cases good…
We consider a revenue-optimizing auctioneer in single-dimensional environments with matroid feasibility constraints. Akbarpour and Li (2020) argue that any revenue-optimal, truthful, and credible mechanism requires unbounded communication.…