1,702 research outputs found
Strategy-Proof and Non-Wasteful Multi-Unit Auction via Social Network
Auctions via social network, pioneered by Li et al. (2017), have been
attracting considerable attention in the literature of mechanism design for
auctions. However, no known mechanism has satisfied strategy-proofness,
non-deficit, non-wastefulness, and individual rationality for the multi-unit
unit-demand auction, except for some naive ones. In this paper, we first
propose a mechanism that satisfies all the above properties. We then make a
comprehensive comparison with two naive mechanisms, showing that the proposed
mechanism dominates them in social surplus, seller's revenue, and incentive of
buyers for truth-telling. We also analyze the characteristics of the social
surplus and the revenue achieved by the proposed mechanism, including the
constant approximability of the worst-case efficiency loss and the complexity
of optimizing revenue from the seller's perspective
Multi-unit Auction over a Social Network
Diffusion auction is an emerging business model where a seller aims to
incentivise buyers in a social network to diffuse the auction information
thereby attracting potential buyers. We focus on designing mechanisms for
multi-unit diffusion auctions. Despite numerous attempts at this problem,
existing mechanisms either fail to be incentive compatible (IC) or achieve only
an unsatisfactory level of social welfare (SW). Here, we propose a novel graph
exploration technique to realise multi-item diffusion auction. This technique
ensures that potential competition among buyers stay ``localised'' so as to
facilitate truthful bidding. Using this technique, we design multi-unit
diffusion auction mechanisms MUDAN and MUDAN-. Both mechanisms satisfy,
among other properties, IC and -weak efficiency. We also show that they
achieve optimal social welfare for the class of rewardless diffusion auctions.
While MUDAN addresses the bottleneck case when each buyer demands only a single
item, MUDAN- handles the more general, multi-demand setting. We further
demonstrate that these mechanisms achieve near-optimal social welfare through
experiments
Characterizations of Network Auctions and Generalizations of VCG
With the growth of networks, promoting products through social networks has
become an important problem. For auctions in social networks, items are needed
to be sold to agents in a network, where each agent can bid and also diffuse
the sale information to her neighbors. Thus, the agents' social relations are
intervened with their bids in the auctions. In network auctions, the classical
VCG mechanism fails to retain key properties. In order to better understand
network auctions, in this paper, we characterize network auctions for the
single-unit setting with respect to weak budget balance, individual
rationality, incentive compatibility, efficiency, and other properties. For
example, we present sufficient conditions for mechanisms to be efficient and
(weakly) incentive compatible. With the help of these properties and new
concepts such as rewards, participation rewards, and so on, we show how to
design efficient mechanisms to satisfy incentive compatibility as much as
possible, and incentive compatibility mechanisms to maximize the revenue. Our
results provide insights into understanding auctions in social networks.Comment: To appear in ECAI 202
Voluntary Agreements under Endogenous Legislative Threats
The paper analyzes the welfare properties of voluntary agreements (VA) with polluters, when they are obtained under the legislative threat of an alternative stricter policy option. In the model, the threat is an abatement quota. Both the threat and its probability of implementation are endogenous. The latter is the outcome of a rent-seeking contest between a green and a polluter lobby group influencing the legislature. We show that a welfare-improving VA systematically emerges in equilibrium and that it is more efficient than the pollution quota. We also discuss various VA design aspects.Environmental policy, voluntary agreements, bargaining, legislatures, rent seeking, rent-seeking contests
Differentially Private Diffusion Auction: The Single-unit Case
Diffusion auction refers to an emerging paradigm of online marketplace where
an auctioneer utilises a social network to attract potential buyers. Diffusion
auction poses significant privacy risks. From the auction outcome, it is
possible to infer hidden, and potentially sensitive, preferences of buyers. To
mitigate such risks, we initiate the study of differential privacy (DP) in
diffusion auction mechanisms. DP is a well-established notion of privacy that
protects a system against inference attacks. Achieving DP in diffusion auctions
is non-trivial as the well-designed auction rules are required to incentivise
the buyers to truthfully report their neighbourhood. We study the single-unit
case and design two differentially private diffusion mechanisms (DPDMs):
recursive DPDM and layered DPDM. We prove that these mechanisms guarantee
differential privacy, incentive compatibility and individual rationality for
both valuations and neighbourhood. We then empirically compare their
performance on real and synthetic datasets
Investment in Hospital Care Technology under Different Purchasing Rules: A Real Option Approach
In this article, we analyse the optimal investment decision in a new health care technology of a representative hospital that maximises its surplus in an uncertain environment. The new technology allows the hospital to increase the quality level of the care provided, but the investment is irreversible. The article uses the framework of the real option literature to show how the purchasing rules might influence the level of investment. We show that the investment in new technology is best incentivate within a long term contract where the number of treatments reimbursed depends on the level of investment made in the period when the technology is new. In this way, asymmetry of information does not affect the outcome of the contract. In our model in fact the purchaser can verify the level of the investment only at the end of each period but the purchasing rule has an anticipating effect on the decision to invest.Health care technologies, Medical quality, Irreversible investments, Real options
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