Related papers: New directions in mechanism design
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…
In the customary VCG (Vickrey-Clarke-Groves) mechanism truth-telling is a dominant strategy. In this paper we study the sequential VCG mechanism and show that other dominant strategies may then exist. We illustrate how this fact can be used…
We consider a task of scheduling with a common deadline on a single machine. Every player reports to a scheduler the length of his job and the scheduler needs to finish as many jobs as possible by the deadline. For this simple problem,…
Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanisms are often used to allocate tasks to selfish and rational agents. VCG mechanisms are incentive compatible, direct mechanisms that are efficient (i.e., maximise social utility) and individually rational…
While the classic Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism ensures incentive compatibility for a static one-shot game, it does not appear to be feasible to construct a dominant truth-telling mechanism for agents that are stochastic dynamic systems.…
The classic Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism ensures incentive compatibility, i.e., that truth-telling of all agents is a dominant strategy, for a static one-shot game. However, in a dynamic environment that unfolds over time, the…
In the standard single-dimensional model of position auctions, bidders agree on the relative values of the positions and each of them submits a single bid that is interpreted in terms of these values. Motivated by current practice in…
A rapidly growing literature on lying in behavioral economics and psychology shows that individuals often do not lie even when lying maximizes their utility. In this work, we attempt to incorporate these findings into the theory of…
Truthfulness is fragile and demanding. It is oftentimes computationally harder than solving the original problem. Even worse, truthfulness can be utterly destroyed by small uncertainties in a mechanism's outcome. One obstacle is that…
We study the mechanism design problem of scheduling unrelated machines and we completely characterize the decisive truthful mechanisms for two players when the domain contains both positive and negative values. We show that the class of…
It is typically expected that if a mechanism is truthful, then the agents would, indeed, truthfully report their private information. But why would an agent believe that the mechanism is truthful? We wish to design truthful mechanisms,…
Transportation network design often involves multiple stakeholders with diverse priorities. We consider a system with a hierarchical multi-agent structure, featuring self-optimized subnetwork operators at the lower level and a central…
We study the problem of automated mechanism design with partial verification, where each type can (mis)report only a restricted set of types (rather than any other type), induced by the principal's limited verification power. We prove…
We study the design of mechanisms under asymmetric awareness and information. While the mechanism designer cannot necessarily commit to a particular social choice function in the face of unawareness, she can at least commit to properties of…
We set up a supply-side game-theoretic model for the cooperative production of virtual products. In our model, a group of producers collaboratively produce a virtual product by contributing costly input resources to a production coalition.…
Mechanism design is essentially reverse engineering of games and involves inducing a game among strategic agents in a way that the induced game satisfies a set of desired properties in an equilibrium of the game. Desirable properties for a…
We study truthful mechanisms for allocation problems in graphs, both for the minimization (i.e., scheduling) and maximization (i.e., auctions) setting. The minimization problem is a special case of the well-studied unrelated machines…
Control reserves are power generation or consumption entities that ensure balance of supply and demand of electricity in real-time. In many countries, they are operated through a market mechanism in which entities provide bids. The system…
Existing auction mechanisms are vulnerable to bidder collusion, which substantially degrades revenue and non-colluder welfare. To design truthful mechanisms resilient to collusion, we introduce a novel approach that leverages a machine…
Exchange markets are a significant type of market economy, in which each agent holds a budget and certain (divisible) resources available for trading. Most research on equilibrium in exchange economies is based on an environment of…