2,132 research outputs found
Enabling Privacy-preserving Auctions in Big Data
We study how to enable auctions in the big data context to solve many
upcoming data-based decision problems in the near future. We consider the
characteristics of the big data including, but not limited to, velocity,
volume, variety, and veracity, and we believe any auction mechanism design in
the future should take the following factors into consideration: 1) generality
(variety); 2) efficiency and scalability (velocity and volume); 3) truthfulness
and verifiability (veracity). In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving
construction for auction mechanism design in the big data, which prevents
adversaries from learning unnecessary information except those implied in the
valid output of the auction. More specifically, we considered one of the most
general form of the auction (to deal with the variety), and greatly improved
the the efficiency and scalability by approximating the NP-hard problems and
avoiding the design based on garbled circuits (to deal with velocity and
volume), and finally prevented stakeholders from lying to each other for their
own benefit (to deal with the veracity). We achieve these by introducing a
novel privacy-preserving winner determination algorithm and a novel payment
mechanism. Additionally, we further employ a blind signature scheme as a
building block to let bidders verify the authenticity of their payment reported
by the auctioneer. The comparison with peer work shows that we improve the
asymptotic performance of peer works' overhead from the exponential growth to a
linear growth and from linear growth to a logarithmic growth, which greatly
improves the scalability
Computer Science and Game Theory: A Brief Survey
There has been a remarkable increase in work at the interface of computer
science and game theory in the past decade. In this article I survey some of
the main themes of work in the area, with a focus on the work in computer
science. Given the length constraints, I make no attempt at being
comprehensive, especially since other surveys are also available, and a
comprehensive survey book will appear shortly.Comment: To appear; Palgrave Dictionary of Economic
Optimal Design of Robust Combinatorial Mechanisms for Substitutable Goods
In this paper we consider multidimensional mechanism design problem for
selling discrete substitutable items to a group of buyers. Previous work on
this problem mostly focus on stochastic description of valuations used by the
seller. However, in certain applications, no prior information regarding
buyers' preferences is known. To address this issue, we consider uncertain
valuations and formulate the problem in a robust optimization framework: the
objective is to minimize the maximum regret. For a special case of
revenue-maximizing pricing problem we present a solution method based on
mixed-integer linear programming formulation
Trust-Based Mechanisms for Robust and Efficient Task Allocation in the Presence of Execution Uncertainty
Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanisms are often used to allocate tasks to selfish and rational agents. VCG mechanisms are incentive-compatible, direct mechanisms that are efficient (i.e. maximise social utility) and individually rational (i.e. agents prefer to join rather than opt out). However, an important assumption of these mechanisms is that the agents will always successfully complete their allocated tasks. Clearly, this assumption is unrealistic in many real-world applications where agents can, and often do, fail in their endeavours. Moreover, whether an agent is deemed to have failed may be perceived differently by different agents. Such subjective perceptions about an agent’s probability of succeeding at a given task are often captured and reasoned about using the notion of trust. Given this background, in this paper, we investigate the design of novel mechanisms that take into account the trust between agents when allocating tasks. Specifically, we develop a new class of mechanisms, called trust-based mechanisms, that can take into account multiple subjective measures of the probability of an agent succeeding at a given task and produce allocations that maximise social utility, whilst ensuring that no agent obtains a negative utility. We then show that such mechanisms pose a challenging new combinatorial optimisation problem (that is NP-complete), devise a novel representation for solving the problem, and develop an effective integer programming solution (that can solve instances with about 2×105 possible allocations in 40 seconds).
Computational Mechanism Design: A Call to Arms
Game theory has developed powerful tools for analyzing decision making in systems with multiple autonomous actors. These tools, when tailored to computational settings, provide a foundation for building multiagent software systems. This tailoring gives rise to the field of computational mechanism design, which applies economic principles to computer systems design
Rate of Price Discovery in Iterative Combinatorial Auctions
We study a class of iterative combinatorial auctions which can be viewed as
subgradient descent methods for the problem of pricing bundles to balance
supply and demand. We provide concrete convergence rates for auctions in this
class, bounding the number of auction rounds needed to reach clearing prices.
Our analysis allows for a variety of pricing schemes, including item, bundle,
and polynomial pricing, and the respective convergence rates confirm that more
expressive pricing schemes come at the cost of slower convergence. We consider
two models of bidder behavior. In the first model, bidders behave
stochastically according to a random utility model, which includes standard
best-response bidding as a special case. In the second model, bidders behave
arbitrarily (even adversarially), and meaningful convergence relies on properly
designed activity rules
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