Non-Separable, Quasiconcave Utilities are Easy -- in a Perfect Price Discrimination Market Model

Recent results, establishing evidence of intractability for such restrictive utility functions as additively separable, piecewise-linear and concave, under both Fisher and Arrow-Debreu market models, have prompted the question of whether we have failed to capture some essential elements of real markets, which seem to do a good job of finding prices that maintain parity between supply and demand. The main point of this paper is to show that even non-separable, quasiconcave utility functions can be handled efficiently in a suitably chosen, though natural, realistic and useful, market model; our model allows for perfect price discrimination. Our model supports unique equilibrium prices and, for the restriction to concave utilities, satisfies both welfare theorems

On Computability of Equilibria in Markets with Production

Although production is an integral part of the Arrow-Debreu market model, most of the work in theoretical computer science has so far concentrated on markets without production, i.e., the exchange economy. This paper takes a significant step towards understanding computational aspects of markets with production. We first define the notion of separable, piecewise-linear concave (SPLC) production by analogy with SPLC utility functions. We then obtain a linear complementarity problem (LCP) formulation that captures exactly the set of equilibria for Arrow-Debreu markets with SPLC utilities and SPLC production, and we give a complementary pivot algorithm for finding an equilibrium. This settles a question asked by Eaves in 1975 of extending his complementary pivot algorithm to markets with production. Since this is a path-following algorithm, we obtain a proof of membership of this problem in PPAD, using Todd, 1976. We also obtain an elementary proof of existence of equilibrium (i.e., without using a fixed point theorem), rationality, and oddness of the number of equilibria. We further give a proof of PPAD-hardness for this problem and also for its restriction to markets with linear utilities and SPLC production. Experiments show that our algorithm runs fast on randomly chosen examples, and unlike previous approaches, it does not suffer from issues of numerical instability. Additionally, it is strongly polynomial when the number of goods or the number of agents and firms is constant. This extends the result of Devanur and Kannan (2008) to markets with production. Finally, we show that an LCP-based approach cannot be extended to PLC (non-separable) production, by constructing an example which has only irrational equilibria.Comment: An extended abstract will appear in SODA 201

The Complexity of Non-Monotone Markets

We introduce the notion of non-monotone utilities, which covers a wide variety of utility functions in economic theory. We then prove that it is PPAD-hard to compute an approximate Arrow-Debreu market equilibrium in markets with linear and non-monotone utilities. Building on this result, we settle the long-standing open problem regarding the computation of an approximate Arrow-Debreu market equilibrium in markets with CES utility functions, by proving that it is PPAD-complete when the Constant Elasticity of Substitution parameter \rho is any constant less than -1

Ascending-Price Algorithms for Unknown Markets

We design a simple ascending-price algorithm to compute a $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximate equilibrium in Arrow-Debreu exchange markets with weak gross substitute (WGS) property, which runs in time polynomial in market parameters and $\log 1/\varepsilon$. This is the first polynomial-time algorithm for most of the known tractable classes of Arrow-Debreu markets, which is easy to implement and avoids heavy machinery such as the ellipsoid method. In addition, our algorithm can be applied in unknown market setting without exact knowledge about the number of agents, their individual utilities and endowments. Instead, our algorithm only relies on queries to a global demand oracle by posting prices and receiving aggregate demand for goods as feedback. When demands are real-valued functions of prices, the oracles can only return values of bounded precision based on real utility functions. Due to this more realistic assumption, precision and representation of prices and demands become a major technical challenge, and we develop new tools and insights that may be of independent interest. Furthermore, our approach also gives the first polynomial-time algorithm to compute an exact equilibrium for markets with spending constraint utilities, a piecewise linear concave generalization of linear utilities. This resolves an open problem posed by Duan and Mehlhorn (2015).Comment: 33 page

The Edgeworth Conjecture with Small Coalitions and Approximate Equilibria in Large Economies

We revisit the connection between bargaining and equilibrium in exchange economies, and study its algorithmic implications. We consider bargaining outcomes to be allocations that cannot be blocked (i.e., profitably re-traded) by coalitions of small size and show that these allocations must be approximate Walrasian equilibria. Our results imply that deciding whether an allocation is approximately Walrasian can be done in polynomial time, even in economies for which finding an equilibrium is known to be computationally hard.Comment: 26 page

Approximating Competitive Equilibrium by Nash Welfare

We explore the relationship between two popular concepts on allocating divisible items: competitive equilibrium (CE) and allocations with maximum Nash welfare, i.e., allocations where the weighted geometric mean of the utilities is maximal. When agents have homogeneous concave utility functions, these two concepts coincide: the classical Eisenberg-Gale convex program that maximizes Nash welfare over feasible allocations yields a competitive equilibrium. However, these two concepts diverge for non-homogeneous utilities. From a computational perspective, maximizing Nash welfare amounts to solving a convex program for any concave utility functions, computing CE becomes PPAD-hard already for separable piecewise linear concave (SPLC) utilities. We introduce the concept of Gale-substitute utility functions, an analogue of the weak gross substitutes (WGS) property for the so-called Gale demand system. For Gale-substitutes utilities, we show that any allocation maximizing Nash welfare provides an approximate-CE with surprisingly strong guarantees, where every agent gets at least half the maximum utility they can get at any CE, and is approximately envy-free. Gale-substitutes include examples of utilities where computing CE is PPAD hard: in particular, all separable concave utilities, and the previously studied non-separable class of Leontief-free utilities. We introduce a new, general class of utility functions called generalized network utilities based on the generalized flow model; this class includes SPLC and Leontief-free utilities. We show that all such utilities are Gale-substitutes. Conversely, although some agents may get much higher utility at a Nash welfare maximizing allocation than at a CE, we show a price of anarchy type result: for general concave utilities, every CE achieves at least $(1/e)^{1/e} > 0.69$ fraction of the maximum Nash welfare, and this factor is tight

The Core of the Participatory Budgeting Problem

In participatory budgeting, communities collectively decide on the allocation of public tax dollars for local public projects. In this work, we consider the question of fairly aggregating the preferences of community members to determine an allocation of funds to projects. This problem is different from standard fair resource allocation because of public goods: The allocated goods benefit all users simultaneously. Fairness is crucial in participatory decision making, since generating equitable outcomes is an important goal of these processes. We argue that the classic game theoretic notion of core captures fairness in the setting. To compute the core, we first develop a novel characterization of a public goods market equilibrium called the Lindahl equilibrium, which is always a core solution. We then provide the first (to our knowledge) polynomial time algorithm for computing such an equilibrium for a broad set of utility functions; our algorithm also generalizes (in a non-trivial way) the well-known concept of proportional fairness. We use our theoretical insights to perform experiments on real participatory budgeting voting data. We empirically show that the core can be efficiently computed for utility functions that naturally model our practical setting, and examine the relation of the core with the familiar welfare objective. Finally, we address concerns of incentives and mechanism design by developing a randomized approximately dominant-strategy truthful mechanism building on the exponential mechanism from differential privacy

Nash-Bargaining-Based Models for Matching Markets: One-Sided and Two-Sided; Fisher and Arrow-Debreu

This paper addresses two deficiencies of models in the area of matching-based market design. The first arises from the recent realization that the most prominent solution that uses cardinal utilities, namely the Hylland-Zeckhauser (HZ) mechanism [Hylland and Zeckhauser, 1979], is intractable; computation of even an approximate equilibrium is PPAD-complete [Vazirani and Yannakakis, 2021; Chen et al., 2021]. The second is the extreme paucity of models that use cardinal utilities, in sharp contrast with general equilibrium theory. Our paper addresses both these issues by proposing Nash-bargaining-based matching market models. Since the Nash bargaining solution is captured by a convex program, efficiency follow; in addition, it possesses a number of desirable game-theoretic properties. Our approach yields a rich collection of models: for one-sided as well as two-sided markets, for Fisher as well as Arrow-Debreu settings, and for a wide range of utility functions, all the way from linear to Leontief. We also give very fast implementations for these models which solve large instances, with n = 2000, in one hour on a PC, even for a two-sided matching market. A number of new ideas were needed, beyond the standard methods, to obtain these implementations