Social Welfare Maximization Auction in Edge Computing Resource Allocation for Mobile Blockchain

Blockchain, an emerging decentralized security system, has been applied in many applications, such as bitcoin, smart grid, and Internet-of-Things. However, running the mining process may cost too much energy consumption and computing resource usage on handheld devices, which restricts the use of blockchain in mobile environments. In this paper, we consider deploying edge computing service to support the mobile blockchain. We propose an auction-based edge computing resource market of the edge computing service provider. Since there is competition among miners, the allocative externalities (positive and negative) are taken into account in the model. In our auction mechanism, we maximize the social welfare while guaranteeing the truthfulness, individual rationality and computational efficiency. Based on blockchain mining experiment results, we define a hash power function that characterizes the probability of successfully mining a block. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance of our auction mechanism which shows that our edge computing resources market model can efficiently solve the social welfare maximization problem for the edge computing service provider

Capturing benefits from water entitlement trade in salinity affected areas: A role for trading houses?

While there is potential for substantial benefits from water entitlement trade, external effects such as salinity may mean that traders cannot capture these benefits. This paper demonstrates that by creating a trading house as a single seller of water entitlements, with trade profits distributed to buyers, it is possible to achieve an allocation of entitlements which gives a social outcome higher than that possible from atomistic competition for entitlements. Such an outcome may be comparable to an optimally set uniform charge for water entitlements, but the trading house mechanism has the advantage that it makes use of trade to generate information on the optimal level of charging in the presence of salinity.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

The Complexity of Fair Division of Indivisible Items with Externalities

We study the computational complexity of fairly allocating a set of indivisible items under externalities. In this recently-proposed setting, in addition to the utility the agent gets from their bundle, they also receive utility from items allocated to other agents. We focus on the extended definitions of envy-freeness up to one item (EF1) and of envy-freeness up to any item (EFX), and we provide the landscape of their complexity for several different scenarios. We prove that it is NP-complete to decide whether there exists an EFX allocation, even when there are only three agents, or even when there are only six different values for the items. We complement these negative results by showing that when both the number of agents and the number of different values for items are bounded by a parameter the problem becomes fixed-parameter tractable. Furthermore, we prove that two-valued and binary-valued instances are equivalent and that EFX and EF1 allocations coincide for this class of instances. Finally, motivated from real-life scenarios, we focus on a class of structured valuation functions, which we term agent/item-correlated. We prove their equivalence to the ``standard'' setting without externalities. Therefore, all previous results for EF1 and EFX apply immediately for these valuations

Analysis of the impact of DMUs on the overall efficiency in the event of a merger

This paper addresses several mechanisms for overall ranking Decision Making Units (DMUs) according to the contribution of DMUs to the relative efficiency score of a merger considering aggregate units The possible organization of agents outside each possible merger naturally influences the relative efficiency score, which motivates the use of games in partition function form and specific ranking indices for DMUs based on the Shapley value. Several computational problems arise in their exact computation when the number of DMUs increases. We describe two sampling alternatives to reduce these drawbacks. Finally, we apply these methods to analyse the efficiency of the hotel industry in SpainThis work has been supported by FEDER/Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades - Agencia Estatal de Investigación, Spain under grants MTM2017-87197-C3-2-P and MTM2017-87197-C3-3-P, and by the Xunta de Galicia through the European Regional Development Fund (Grupos de Referencia Competitiva ED431C-2017/38) and by the Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Universidades, Xunta de Galicia, Spain (Grupos de Referencia Competitiva ED431C-2020/03).S

Deterministic, Strategyproof, and Fair Cake Cutting

We study the classic cake cutting problem from a mechanism design perspective, in particular focusing on deterministic mechanisms that are strategyproof and fair. We begin by looking at mechanisms that are non-wasteful and primarily show that for even the restricted class of piecewise constant valuations there exists no direct-revelation mechanism that is strategyproof and even approximately proportional. Subsequently, we remove the non-wasteful constraint and show another impossibility result stating that there is no strategyproof and approximately proportional direct-revelation mechanism that outputs contiguous allocations, again, for even the restricted class of piecewise constant valuations. In addition to the above results, we also present some negative results when considering an approximate notion of strategyproofness, show a connection between direct-revelation mechanisms and mechanisms in the Robertson-Webb model when agents have piecewise constant valuations, and finally also present a (minor) modification to the well-known Even-Paz algorithm that has better incentive-compatible properties for the cases when there are two or three agents.Comment: A shorter version of this paper will appear at IJCAI 201

Controling externalities with asymmetric information : Ferrous Scrap Recycling and the Gold Rush Problem

Nous proposons un modèle de l'organisation monopsonistique d'une filière de recyclage des métaux ferreux. Ce type d'activité se distingue par des externalités négatives propres à la collecte et de fortes asymétries d'information sur la qualité des matières collectées. Après avoir mis en lumière un effet de "ruée vers l'or" - la relation entre le niveau de prix et les externalités négatives de collecte - nous expliquons comment un recycleur monopsoneur régule l'activité de collecte en contrôlant le degré d'asymétrie d'information. En particulier, plus la valeur d'une ferraille est élevée, plus les asymétries d'information doivent être importantes. En termes de bien-être, ceci peut être efficace mais induit un dilemme équité-efficacité, lequel est d'autant plus marqué que l'on intègre la dimension environnementale du problème.