16,721 research outputs found
Envy Freedom and Prior-free Mechanism Design
We consider the provision of an abstract service to single-dimensional
agents. Our model includes position auctions, single-minded combinatorial
auctions, and constrained matching markets. When the agents' values are drawn
from a distribution, the Bayesian optimal mechanism is given by Myerson (1981)
as a virtual-surplus optimizer. We develop a framework for prior-free mechanism
design and analysis. A good mechanism in our framework approximates the optimal
mechanism for the distribution if there is a distribution; moreover, when there
is no distribution this mechanism still performs well.
We define and characterize optimal envy-free outcomes in symmetric
single-dimensional environments. Our characterization mirrors Myerson's theory.
Furthermore, unlike in mechanism design where there is no point-wise optimal
mechanism, there is always a point-wise optimal envy-free outcome.
Envy-free outcomes and incentive-compatible mechanisms are similar in
structure and performance. We therefore use the optimal envy-free revenue as a
benchmark for measuring the performance of a prior-free mechanism. A good
mechanism is one that approximates the envy free benchmark on any profile of
agent values. We show that good mechanisms exist, and in particular, a natural
generalization of the random sampling auction of Goldberg et al. (2001) is a
constant approximation
Product Multicommodity Flow in Wireless Networks
We provide a tight approximate characterization of the -dimensional
product multicommodity flow (PMF) region for a wireless network of nodes.
Separate characterizations in terms of the spectral properties of appropriate
network graphs are obtained in both an information theoretic sense and for a
combinatorial interference model (e.g., Protocol model). These provide an inner
approximation to the dimensional capacity region. These results answer
the following questions which arise naturally from previous work: (a) What is
the significance of in the scaling laws for the Protocol
interference model obtained by Gupta and Kumar (2000)? (b) Can we obtain a
tight approximation to the "maximum supportable flow" for node distributions
more general than the geometric random distribution, traffic models other than
randomly chosen source-destination pairs, and under very general assumptions on
the channel fading model?
We first establish that the random source-destination model is essentially a
one-dimensional approximation to the capacity region, and a special case of
product multi-commodity flow. Building on previous results, for a combinatorial
interference model given by a network and a conflict graph, we relate the
product multicommodity flow to the spectral properties of the underlying graphs
resulting in computational upper and lower bounds. For the more interesting
random fading model with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), we show that the
scaling laws for PMF can again be tightly characterized by the spectral
properties of appropriately defined graphs. As an implication, we obtain
computationally efficient upper and lower bounds on the PMF for any wireless
network with a guaranteed approximation factor.Comment: Revised version of "Capacity-Delay Scaling in Arbitrary Wireless
Networks" submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Part of
this work appeared in the Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and
Computing, Monticello, IL, 2005, and the Internation Symposium on Information
Theory (ISIT), 200
Statics and dynamics of selfish interactions in distributed service systems
We study a class of games which model the competition among agents to access
some service provided by distributed service units and which exhibit congestion
and frustration phenomena when service units have limited capacity. We propose
a technique, based on the cavity method of statistical physics, to characterize
the full spectrum of Nash equilibria of the game. The analysis reveals a large
variety of equilibria, with very different statistical properties. Natural
selfish dynamics, such as best-response, usually tend to large-utility
equilibria, even though those of smaller utility are exponentially more
numerous. Interestingly, the latter actually can be reached by selecting the
initial conditions of the best-response dynamics close to the saturation limit
of the service unit capacities. We also study a more realistic stochastic
variant of the game by means of a simple and effective approximation of the
average over the random parameters, showing that the properties of the
average-case Nash equilibria are qualitatively similar to the deterministic
ones.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figure
- …