5,199 research outputs found
Recognising Multidimensional Euclidean Preferences
Euclidean preferences are a widely studied preference model, in which
decision makers and alternatives are embedded in d-dimensional Euclidean space.
Decision makers prefer those alternatives closer to them. This model, also
known as multidimensional unfolding, has applications in economics,
psychometrics, marketing, and many other fields. We study the problem of
deciding whether a given preference profile is d-Euclidean. For the
one-dimensional case, polynomial-time algorithms are known. We show that, in
contrast, for every other fixed dimension d > 1, the recognition problem is
equivalent to the existential theory of the reals (ETR), and so in particular
NP-hard. We further show that some Euclidean preference profiles require
exponentially many bits in order to specify any Euclidean embedding, and prove
that the domain of d-Euclidean preferences does not admit a finite forbidden
minor characterisation for any d > 1. We also study dichotomous preferencesand
the behaviour of other metrics, and survey a variety of related work.Comment: 17 page
Computational Efficiency Requires Simple Taxation
We characterize the communication complexity of truthful mechanisms. Our
departure point is the well known taxation principle. The taxation principle
asserts that every truthful mechanism can be interpreted as follows: every
player is presented with a menu that consists of a price for each bundle (the
prices depend only on the valuations of the other players). Each player is
allocated a bundle that maximizes his profit according to this menu. We define
the taxation complexity of a truthful mechanism to be the logarithm of the
maximum number of menus that may be presented to a player.
Our main finding is that in general the taxation complexity essentially
equals the communication complexity. The proof consists of two main steps.
First, we prove that for rich enough domains the taxation complexity is at most
the communication complexity. We then show that the taxation complexity is much
smaller than the communication complexity only in "pathological" cases and
provide a formal description of these extreme cases.
Next, we study mechanisms that access the valuations via value queries only.
In this setting we establish that the menu complexity -- a notion that was
already studied in several different contexts -- characterizes the number of
value queries that the mechanism makes in exactly the same way that the
taxation complexity characterizes the communication complexity.
Our approach yields several applications, including strengthening the
solution concept with low communication overhead, fast computation of prices,
and hardness of approximation by computationally efficient truthful mechanisms
Reallocation Mechanisms
We consider reallocation problems in settings where the initial endowment of
each agent consists of a subset of the resources. The private information of
the players is their value for every possible subset of the resources. The goal
is to redistribute resources among agents to maximize efficiency. Monetary
transfers are allowed, but participation is voluntary.
We develop incentive-compatible, individually-rational and budget balanced
mechanisms for several classic settings, including bilateral trade, partnership
dissolving, Arrow-Debreu markets, and combinatorial exchanges. All our
mechanisms (except one) provide a constant approximation to the optimal
efficiency in these settings, even in ones where the preferences of the agents
are complex multi-parameter functions
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