7 research outputs found
Multi-unit Bilateral Trade
We characterise the set of dominant strategy incentive compatible (DSIC),
strongly budget balanced (SBB), and ex-post individually rational (IR)
mechanisms for the multi-unit bilateral trade setting. In such a setting there
is a single buyer and a single seller who holds a finite number k of identical
items. The mechanism has to decide how many units of the item are transferred
from the seller to the buyer and how much money is transferred from the buyer
to the seller. We consider two classes of valuation functions for the buyer and
seller: Valuations that are increasing in the number of units in possession,
and the more specific class of valuations that are increasing and submodular.
Furthermore, we present some approximation results about the performance of
certain such mechanisms, in terms of social welfare: For increasing submodular
valuation functions, we show the existence of a deterministic 2-approximation
mechanism and a randomised e/(1-e) approximation mechanism, matching the best
known bounds for the single-item setting
Strongly Budget Balanced Auctions for Multi-Sided Markets
In two-sided markets, Myerson and Satterthwaite's impossibility theorem
states that one can not maximize the gain-from-trade while also satisfying
truthfulness, individual-rationality and no deficit. Attempts have been made to
circumvent Myerson and Satterthwaite's result by attaining
approximately-maximum gain-from-trade: the double-sided auctions of McAfee
(1992) is truthful and has no deficit, and the one by Segal-Halevi et al.
(2016) additionally has no surplus --- it is strongly-budget-balanced. They
consider two categories of agents --- buyers and sellers, where each trade set
is composed of a single buyer and a single seller. The practical complexity of
applications such as supply chain require one to look beyond two-sided markets.
Common requirements are for: buyers trading with multiple sellers of different
or identical items, buyers trading with sellers through transporters and
mediators, and sellers trading with multiple buyers. We attempt to address
these settings. We generalize Segal-Halevi et al. (2016)'s
strongly-budget-balanced double-sided auction setting to a multilateral market
where each trade set is composed of any number of agent categories. Our
generalization refines the notion of competition in multi-sided auctions by
introducing the concepts of external competition and trade reduction. We also
show an obviously-truthful implementation of our auction using multiple
ascending prices.Comment: Preliminary version accepted to AAAI 2020. This version adds (1)
External competition auction for arbitrary recipe vectors; (2)
Obvious-truthfulness proof; (3) Simulation experiment
Multi-Unit Bilateral Trade
We characterise the set of dominant strategy incentive compatible (DSIC), strongly budget balanced (SBB), and ex-post individually rational (IR) mechanisms for the multi-unit bilateral trade setting. In such a setting there is a single buyer and a single seller who holds a finite number k of identical items. The mechanism has to decide how many units of the item are transferred from the seller to the buyer and how much money is transferred from the buyer to the seller. We consider two classes of valuation functions for the buyer and seller: Valuations that are increasing in the number of units in possession, and the more specific class of valuations that are increasing and submodular. Furthermore, we present some approximation results about the performance of certain such mechanisms, in terms of social welfare: For increasing submodular valuation functions, we show the existence of a deterministic 2-approximation mechanism and a randomised e/(1 − e) approximation mechanism, matching the best known bounds for the single-item setting
Multi-unit bilateral trade
We characterise the set of dominant strategy incentive compatible (DSIC), strongly budget balanced (SBB), and ex-post individually rational (IR) mechanisms for the multi-unit bilateral trade setting. In such a setting there is a single buyer and a single seller who holds a finite number k of identical items. The mechanism has to decide how many units of the item are transferred from the seller to the buyer and how much money is transferred from the buyer to the seller. We consider two classes of valuation functions for the buyer and seller: Valuations that are increasing in the number of units in possession, and the more specific class of valuations that are increasing and submodular. Furthermore, we present some approximation results about the performance of certain such mechanisms, in terms of social welfare: For increasing submodular valuation functions, we show the existence of a deterministic 2-approximation mechanism and a randomised e/(1 − e) approximation mechanism, matching the best known bounds for the single-item setting
Multi-unit bilateral trade
We characterise the set of dominant strategy incentive compatible (DSIC), strongly budget balanced (SBB), and ex-post individually rational (IR) mechanisms for the multi-unit bilateral trade setting. In such a setting there is a single buyer and a single seller who holds a finite number k of identical items. The mechanism has to decide how many units of the item are transferred from the seller to the buyer and how much money is transferred from the buyer to the seller. We consider two classes of valuation functions for the buyer and seller: Valuations that are increasing in the number of units in possession, and the more specific class of valuations that are increasing and submodular.
Furthermore, we present some approximation results about the performance of certain such mechanisms, in terms of social welfare: For increasing submodular valuation functions, we show the existence of a deterministic 2-approximation mechanism and a randomised e/(1 − e) approximation mechanism, matching the best known bounds for the single-item setting