3,103 research outputs found
Budget Feasible Mechanism Design: From Prior-Free to Bayesian
Budget feasible mechanism design studies procurement combinatorial auctions
where the sellers have private costs to produce items, and the
buyer(auctioneer) aims to maximize a social valuation function on subsets of
items, under the budget constraint on the total payment. One of the most
important questions in the field is "which valuation domains admit truthful
budget feasible mechanisms with `small' approximations (compared to the social
optimum)?" Singer showed that additive and submodular functions have such
constant approximations. Recently, Dobzinski, Papadimitriou, and Singer gave an
O(log^2 n)-approximation mechanism for subadditive functions; they also
remarked that: "A fundamental question is whether, regardless of computational
constraints, a constant-factor budget feasible mechanism exists for subadditive
functions."
We address this question from two viewpoints: prior-free worst case analysis
and Bayesian analysis. For the prior-free framework, we use an LP that
describes the fractional cover of the valuation function; it is also connected
to the concept of approximate core in cooperative game theory. We provide an
O(I)-approximation mechanism for subadditive functions, via the worst case
integrality gap I of LP. This implies an O(log n)-approximation for subadditive
valuations, O(1)-approximation for XOS valuations, and for valuations with a
constant I. XOS valuations are an important class of functions that lie between
submodular and subadditive classes. We give another polynomial time O(log
n/loglog n) sub-logarithmic approximation mechanism for subadditive valuations.
For the Bayesian framework, we provide a constant approximation mechanism for
all subadditive functions, using the above prior-free mechanism for XOS
valuations as a subroutine. Our mechanism allows correlations in the
distribution of private information and is universally truthful.Comment: to appear in STOC 201
Chain: A Dynamic Double Auction Framework for Matching Patient Agents
In this paper we present and evaluate a general framework for the design of
truthful auctions for matching agents in a dynamic, two-sided market. A single
commodity, such as a resource or a task, is bought and sold by multiple buyers
and sellers that arrive and depart over time. Our algorithm, Chain, provides
the first framework that allows a truthful dynamic double auction (DA) to be
constructed from a truthful, single-period (i.e. static) double-auction rule.
The pricing and matching method of the Chain construction is unique amongst
dynamic-auction rules that adopt the same building block. We examine
experimentally the allocative efficiency of Chain when instantiated on various
single-period rules, including the canonical McAfee double-auction rule. For a
baseline we also consider non-truthful double auctions populated with
zero-intelligence plus"-style learning agents. Chain-based auctions perform
well in comparison with other schemes, especially as arrival intensity falls
and agent valuations become more volatile
Selling Privacy at Auction
We initiate the study of markets for private data, though the lens of
differential privacy. Although the purchase and sale of private data has
already begun on a large scale, a theory of privacy as a commodity is missing.
In this paper, we propose to build such a theory. Specifically, we consider a
setting in which a data analyst wishes to buy information from a population
from which he can estimate some statistic. The analyst wishes to obtain an
accurate estimate cheaply. On the other hand, the owners of the private data
experience some cost for their loss of privacy, and must be compensated for
this loss. Agents are selfish, and wish to maximize their profit, so our goal
is to design truthful mechanisms. Our main result is that such auctions can
naturally be viewed and optimally solved as variants of multi-unit procurement
auctions. Based on this result, we derive auctions for two natural settings
which are optimal up to small constant factors:
1. In the setting in which the data analyst has a fixed accuracy goal, we
show that an application of the classic Vickrey auction achieves the analyst's
accuracy goal while minimizing his total payment.
2. In the setting in which the data analyst has a fixed budget, we give a
mechanism which maximizes the accuracy of the resulting estimate while
guaranteeing that the resulting sum payments do not exceed the analysts budget.
In both cases, our comparison class is the set of envy-free mechanisms, which
correspond to the natural class of fixed-price mechanisms in our setting.
In both of these results, we ignore the privacy cost due to possible
correlations between an individuals private data and his valuation for privacy
itself. We then show that generically, no individually rational mechanism can
compensate individuals for the privacy loss incurred due to their reported
valuations for privacy.Comment: Extended Abstract appeared in the proceedings of EC 201
- …