1,197 research outputs found
Truthful Multi-unit Procurements with Budgets
We study procurement games where each seller supplies multiple units of his
item, with a cost per unit known only to him. The buyer can purchase any number
of units from each seller, values different combinations of the items
differently, and has a budget for his total payment.
For a special class of procurement games, the {\em bounded knapsack} problem,
we show that no universally truthful budget-feasible mechanism can approximate
the optimal value of the buyer within , where is the total number of
units of all items available. We then construct a polynomial-time mechanism
that gives a -approximation for procurement games with {\em concave
additive valuations}, which include bounded knapsack as a special case. Our
mechanism is thus optimal up to a constant factor. Moreover, for the bounded
knapsack problem, given the well-known FPTAS, our results imply there is a
provable gap between the optimization domain and the mechanism design domain.
Finally, for procurement games with {\em sub-additive valuations}, we
construct a universally truthful budget-feasible mechanism that gives an
-approximation in polynomial time with a
demand oracle.Comment: To appear at WINE 201
Budget-Feasible Mechanism Design for Non-Monotone Submodular Objectives: Offline and Online
The framework of budget-feasible mechanism design studies procurement
auctions where the auctioneer (buyer) aims to maximize his valuation function
subject to a hard budget constraint. We study the problem of designing truthful
mechanisms that have good approximation guarantees and never pay the
participating agents (sellers) more than the budget. We focus on the case of
general (non-monotone) submodular valuation functions and derive the first
truthful, budget-feasible and -approximate mechanisms that run in
polynomial time in the value query model, for both offline and online auctions.
Prior to our work, the only -approximation mechanism known for
non-monotone submodular objectives required an exponential number of value
queries.
At the heart of our approach lies a novel greedy algorithm for non-monotone
submodular maximization under a knapsack constraint. Our algorithm builds two
candidate solutions simultaneously (to achieve a good approximation), yet
ensures that agents cannot jump from one solution to the other (to implicitly
enforce truthfulness). Ours is the first mechanism for the problem
where---crucially---the agents are not ordered with respect to their marginal
value per cost. This allows us to appropriately adapt these ideas to the online
setting as well.
To further illustrate the applicability of our approach, we also consider the
case where additional feasibility constraints are present. We obtain
-approximation mechanisms for both monotone and non-monotone submodular
objectives, when the feasible solutions are independent sets of a -system.
With the exception of additive valuation functions, no mechanisms were known
for this setting prior to our work. Finally, we provide lower bounds suggesting
that, when one cares about non-trivial approximation guarantees in polynomial
time, our results are asymptotically best possible.Comment: Accepted to EC 201
Randomized Strategies for Robust Combinatorial Optimization
In this paper, we study the following robust optimization problem. Given an
independence system and candidate objective functions, we choose an independent
set, and then an adversary chooses one objective function, knowing our choice.
Our goal is to find a randomized strategy (i.e., a probability distribution
over the independent sets) that maximizes the expected objective value. To
solve the problem, we propose two types of schemes for designing approximation
algorithms. One scheme is for the case when objective functions are linear. It
first finds an approximately optimal aggregated strategy and then retrieves a
desired solution with little loss of the objective value. The approximation
ratio depends on a relaxation of an independence system polytope. As
applications, we provide approximation algorithms for a knapsack constraint or
a matroid intersection by developing appropriate relaxations and retrievals.
The other scheme is based on the multiplicative weights update method. A key
technique is to introduce a new concept called -reductions for
objective functions with parameters . We show that our scheme
outputs a nearly -approximate solution if there exists an
-approximation algorithm for a subproblem defined by
-reductions. This improves approximation ratio in previous
results. Using our result, we provide approximation algorithms when the
objective functions are submodular or correspond to the cardinality robustness
for the knapsack problem
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