Intertemporal Allocation of Indivisible and Durable Goods

This paper presents a futures mechanism, as defined by Kurino (2009), allocating a set of indivisible and durable goods among a set of agents over multiple time periods. The mechanism is shown to satisfy individual rationality, Pareto efficiency and non-bossiness for allocation problems with or without endowments. The paper also shows that the mechanism does not satisfy strategy-proofness and presents the conditions under which the mechanism is manipulable

Combinatorial Civic Crowdfunding with Budgeted Agents: Welfare Optimality at Equilibrium and Optimal Deviation

Civic Crowdfunding (CC) uses the ``power of the crowd'' to garner contributions towards public projects. As these projects are non-excludable, agents may prefer to ``free-ride,'' resulting in the project not being funded. For single project CC, researchers propose to provide refunds to incentivize agents to contribute, thereby guaranteeing the project's funding. These funding guarantees are applicable only when agents have an unlimited budget. This work focuses on a combinatorial setting, where multiple projects are available for CC and agents have a limited budget. We study certain specific conditions where funding can be guaranteed. Further, funding the optimal social welfare subset of projects is desirable when every available project cannot be funded due to budget restrictions. We prove the impossibility of achieving optimal welfare at equilibrium for any monotone refund scheme. We then study different heuristics that the agents can use to contribute to the projects in practice. Through simulations, we demonstrate the heuristics' performance as the average-case trade-off between welfare obtained and agent utility.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI '23). A preliminary version of this paper titled "Welfare Optimal Combinatorial Civic Crowdfunding with Budgeted Agents" also appeared at GAIW@AAMAS '2

Auctions, Bidding and Exchange Design

The different auction types are outlined using a classification framework along six dimensions. The economic properties that are desired in the design of auction mechanisms and the complexities that arise in their implementation are discussed. Some of the most interesting designs from the literature are analyzed in detail to establish known results and to identify the emerging research directions.Engineering and Applied Science

Dynamic Models of Reputation and Competition in Job-Market Matching

A fundamental decision faced by a firm hiring employees - and a familiar one to anyone who has dealt with the academic job market, for example - is deciding what caliber of candidates to pursue. Should the firm try to increase its reputation by making offers to higher-quality candidates, despite the risk that the candidates might reject the offers and leave the firm empty-handed? Or should it concentrate on weaker candidates who are more likely to accept the offer? The question acquires an added level of complexity once we take into account the effect one hiring cycle has on the next: hiring better employees in the current cycle increases the firm's reputation, which in turn increases its attractiveness for higher-quality candidates in the next hiring cycle. These considerations introduce an interesting temporal dynamic aspect to the rich line of research on matching models for job markets, in which long-range planning and evolving reputational effects enter into the strategic decisions made by competing firms. We develop a model based on two competing firms to try capturing as cleanly as possible the elements that we believe constitute the strategic tension at the core of the problem: the trade-off between short-term recruiting success and long-range reputation-building; the inefficiency that results from underemployment of people who are not ranked highest; and the influence of earlier accidental outcomes on long-term reputations. Our model exhibits all these phenomena in a stylized setting, governed by a parameter q that captures the difference in strength between the two top candidates in each hiring cycle. We show that when q is relatively low the efficiency of the job market is improved by long-range reputational effects, but when q is relatively high, taking future reputations into account can sometimes reduce the efficiency

Mechanisms for Dynamic Setting with Restricted Allocations

Dynamic mechanism design is an important area of multiagent systems, and commonly used in resource allocation where the resources are time related or the agents exist dynamically. We focus on a multiagent model within which the agents stay, and the resources arrive and depart. The resources are interpreted as work or jobs and are called tasks. The allocation outcome space has a special restriction that every agent can only work on one resource at a time, because every agent has a finite computational capability in reality. We propose a dynamic mechanism and analyze its incentive properties; we show that the mechanism is incentive compatible. Empirically, our dynamic mechanism performs well and is able to achieve high economic efficiency, even outperforming standard approaches if the agents are concerned about future tasks. We also introduce a static mechanism under the setting of a restricted outcome space; it is proved that the static mechanism is incentive compatible, and its computational complexity is much less than that of the standard VCG mechanism

Heidegger and the question concerning technology

A view of technology as a particular and partial way in which the world is revealed to us rather than as merely a means of producing or manufacturing. 'Being-the-world, ready to hand, present at hand, equipment, signs, conspicuousness, disturbance, region are key concepts in Being and Time which are relevant to an understanding of technology. An examination of Heidegger's explicit writing on technology and an examination of concepts as the 'standing-reserve' (Bestand), the framework (Gestell) and the 'fourfold'. These concepts are examined with reference to more modem everyday encounters with machines, switches, devices and grids. What are the different characterisations of technology? Other ideas test include the viability of describing technology as a distinctly 'modem' phenomena. Is there such a thing as a technological concept of time and if so what are its main features? The second half of the dissertation examines ways in which we may come to regard technology as less than all pervasive, how do we might minimise its claim on us. How should we best handle, cope, reform, understanding technology given the problems technology confront us with, Heidegger's suggestions for alternate and less partial modes of revealing are described, modes of revealing such as 'Practices', 'The Work of Art' and' Language' and 'the Thing'

The Fourth Amendment and the Problem of Social Cost

The Supreme Court has made social cost a core concept relevant to the calculation of Fourth Amendment remedies but has never explained the concept’s meaning. The Court limits the availability of both the exclusionary rule and civil damages because of their “substantial social costs.” According to the Court, these costs primarily consist of letting the lawbreaker go free by excluding evidence or deterring effective police practices that would lead to more criminal apprehension and prosecution. But recent calls for systemic police reform by social movements have a different view of social cost. So too do calls for reforming qualified immunity. Police illegality—the precondition for exclusion or damages— itself produces substantial social costs, especially when one considers the systemic effects of minor illegality on a community-wide scale. The Court does not currently take account of these social costs, raising the question: why not? Taking a cue from Professor Ronald Coase’s famous analysis of the problem of social cost, this Article analyzes why it is necessary for the Court to refocus its social cost inquiry to include pervasive and corrosive social costs external to its present doctrinal focus. Surprisingly, given its analytic centrality, neither the Court nor commentators have clarified what “social cost” entails or how to calculate it. This Article takes up this task and charts the unexpected implications that would follow if the Court were to take its own commitment to minimize “social cost” seriously. Conceptions of social cost rely on choices of perspective and judgments about what counts as salient harms that necessitate a remedy. To date, the predominant perspective the Court takes in constructing and implementing Fourth Amendment doctrine is the policing perspective. This perspective is evident both when doctrine is applied to ordinary cases and when doctrine is shaped by using video evidence such as body-worn cameras that reinforces law enforcement’s perspective. The result of prioritizing a policing perspective is to focus on the harms produced by imposing the exclusionary rule or civil liability on law enforcement’s illegal acts, not upon the harms suffered by innocent individuals and broader communities. Such a narrow perspective is a problem because it constructs constitutional meaning in a way that excludes much of what scholars and the public take the Fourth Amendment to mean through the values it protects. Harms that flow from those citizens who are law enforcement officers—those empowered with the authority to search, arrest, employ violence, and use deadly force—that break the law may be particularly acute given the special role they play in political society. This Article articulates this concern as an inverted “broken- windows” analysis. Just as minor crime left unregulated within a community is said to produce greater social harm through the spread of lawlessness, minor illegality perpetrated by police left unregulated can produce greater social harm—with sometimes tragic effects—through police impunity. This latter possibility is insufficiently recognized in theory and practice. Through such internal criticism of Supreme Court doctrine, this Article begins from the Court’s own commitment to the analytic centrality of social cost when constructing the meaning of the Fourth Amendment through its exclusionary-rule and qualified-immunity doctrines and proposes additional perspectives necessary for more accurate calculations designed to protect constitutional rights and promote political community

Trust in Robots

Robots are increasingly becoming prevalent in our daily lives within our living or working spaces. We hope that robots will take up tedious, mundane or dirty chores and make our lives more comfortable, easy and enjoyable by providing companionship and care. However, robots may pose a threat to human privacy, safety and autonomy; therefore, it is necessary to have constant control over the developing technology to ensure the benevolent intentions and safety of autonomous systems. Building trust in (autonomous) robotic systems is thus necessary. The title of this book highlights this challenge: “Trust in robots—Trusting robots”. Herein, various notions and research areas associated with robots are unified. The theme “Trust in robots” addresses the development of technology that is trustworthy for users; “Trusting robots” focuses on building a trusting relationship with robots, furthering previous research. These themes and topics are at the core of the PhD program “Trust Robots” at TU Wien, Austria