2 research outputs found
Quantized VCG Mechanisms for Polymatroid Environments
Many network resource allocation problems can be viewed as allocating a
divisible resource, where the allocations are constrained to lie in a
polymatroid. We consider market-based mechanisms for such problems. Though the
Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism can provide the efficient allocation with
strong incentive properties (namely dominant strategy incentive compatibility),
its well-known high communication requirements can prevent it from being used.
There have been a number of approaches for reducing the communication costs of
VCG by weakening its incentive properties. Here, instead we take a different
approach of reducing communication costs via quantization while maintaining
VCG's dominant strategy incentive properties. The cost for this approach is a
loss in efficiency which we characterize. We first consider quantizing the
resource allocations so that agents need only submit a finite number of bids
instead of full utility function. We subsequently consider quantizing the
agent's bids