25,708 research outputs found
Public projects, Boolean functions and the borders of Border's theorem
Border's theorem gives an intuitive linear characterization of the feasible
interim allocation rules of a Bayesian single-item environment, and it has
several applications in economic and algorithmic mechanism design. All known
generalizations of Border's theorem either restrict attention to relatively
simple settings, or resort to approximation. This paper identifies a
complexity-theoretic barrier that indicates, assuming standard complexity class
separations, that Border's theorem cannot be extended significantly beyond the
state-of-the-art. We also identify a surprisingly tight connection between
Myerson's optimal auction theory, when applied to public project settings, and
some fundamental results in the analysis of Boolean functions.Comment: Accepted to ACM EC 201
Supply chain collaboration
In the past, research in operations management focused on single-firm analysis. Its goal was to provide managers in practice with suitable tools to improve the performance of their firm by calculating optimal inventory quantities, among others. Nowadays, business decisions are dominated by the globalization of markets and increased competition among firms. Further, more and more products reach the customer through supply chains that are composed of independent firms. Following these trends, research in operations management has shifted its focus from single-firm analysis to multi-firm analysis, in particular to improving the efficiency and performance of supply chains under decentralized control. The main characteristics of such chains are that the firms in the chain are independent actors who try to optimize their individual objectives, and that the decisions taken by a firm do also affect the performance of the other parties in the supply chain. These interactions among firms’ decisions ask for alignment and coordination of actions. Therefore, game theory, the study of situations of cooperation or conflict among heterogenous actors, is very well suited to deal with these interactions. This has been recognized by researchers in the field, since there are an ever increasing number of papers that applies tools, methods and models from game theory to supply chain problems
Communication-efficient Distributed Multi-resource Allocation
In several smart city applications, multiple resources must be allocated
among competing agents that are coupled through such shared resources and are
constrained --- either through limitations of communication infrastructure or
privacy considerations. We propose a distributed algorithm to solve such
distributed multi-resource allocation problems with no direct inter-agent
communication. We do so by extending a recently introduced additive-increase
multiplicative-decrease (AIMD) algorithm, which only uses very little
communication between the system and agents. Namely, a control unit broadcasts
a one-bit signal to agents whenever one of the allocated resources exceeds
capacity. Agents then respond to this signal in a probabilistic manner. In the
proposed algorithm, each agent makes decision of its resource demand locally
and an agent is unaware of the resource allocation of other agents. In
empirical results, we observe that the average allocations converge over time
to optimal allocations.Comment: To appear in IEEE International Smart Cities Conference (ISC2 2018),
Kansas City, USA, September, 2018. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap
with arXiv:1711.0197
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