111 research outputs found
Undominated Groves Mechanisms
The family of Groves mechanisms, which includes the well-known VCG mechanism
(also known as the Clarke mechanism), is a family of efficient and
strategy-proof mechanisms. Unfortunately, the Groves mechanisms are generally
not budget balanced. That is, under such mechanisms, payments may flow into or
out of the system of the agents, resulting in deficits or reduced utilities for
the agents. We consider the following problem: within the family of Groves
mechanisms, we want to identify mechanisms that give the agents the highest
utilities, under the constraint that these mechanisms must never incur
deficits.
We adopt a prior-free approach. We introduce two general measures for
comparing mechanisms in prior-free settings. We say that a non-deficit Groves
mechanism {\em individually dominates} another non-deficit Groves mechanism
if for every type profile, every agent's utility under is no less than
that under , and this holds with strict inequality for at least one type
profile and one agent. We say that a non-deficit Groves mechanism {\em
collectively dominates} another non-deficit Groves mechanism if for every
type profile, the agents' total utility under is no less than that under
, and this holds with strict inequality for at least one type profile. The
above definitions induce two partial orders on non-deficit Groves mechanisms.
We study the maximal elements corresponding to these two partial orders, which
we call the {\em individually undominated} mechanisms and the {\em collectively
undominated} mechanisms, respectively.Comment: 34 pages. To appear in Journal of AI Research (JAIR
"On Detail-Free Mechanism Design and Rationality"
The study of mechanism design is sometimes criticized, because the designed mechanisms depend on the fine detail of the model specification, and agents' behavior relies on the strong common knowledge assumptions on their rationality and others. Hence, the study of 'detail-free' mechanism design with weak informational assumptions is the most important to make as the first step towards a practically useful theory. This paper will emphasize that even if we confine our attentions to detail-free mechanisms with week rationality, there still exist a plenty of scope for development of new ideas on how to design a mechanism to play the powerful role. We briefly explain my recent works on this line, and argue that the use of stochastic decision works much in large exchange economics, and agents' moral preferences can drastically improve implementability of social choice functions.
Undominated Groves Mechanisms
The family of Groves mechanisms, which includes the well-known VCG mechanism (also
known as the Clarke mechanism), is a family of efficient and strategy-proof mechanisms.
Unfortunately, the Groves mechanisms are generally not budget balanced. That is, under
such mechanisms, payments may flow into or out of the system of the agents, resulting
in deficits or reduced utilities for the agents. We consider the following problem: within
the family of Groves mechanisms, we want to identify mechanisms that give the agents the
highest utilities, under the constraint that these mechanisms must never incur deficits.
We adopt a prior-free approach. We introduce two general measures for comparing
mechanisms in prior-free settings. We say that a non-deficit Groves mechanism M in-
dividually dominates another non-deficit Groves mechanism M′ if for every type profile,
every agent’s utility under M is no less than that under M′, and this holds with strict
inequality for at least one type profile and one agent. We say that a non-deficit Groves
mechanism M collectively dominates another non-deficit Groves mechanism M′ if for every
type profile, the agents’ total utility under M is no less than that under M′, and this holds
with strict inequality for at least one type profile. The above definitions induce two partial
orders on non-deficit Groves mechanisms. We study the maximal elements corresponding
to these two partial orders, which we call the individually undominated mechanisms and
the collectively undominated mechanisms, respectively
Implementation in Advised Strategies: Welfare Guarantees from Posted-Price Mechanisms When Demand Queries Are NP-Hard
State-of-the-art posted-price mechanisms for submodular bidders with
items achieve approximation guarantees of [Assadi and
Singla, 2019]. Their truthfulness, however, requires bidders to compute an
NP-hard demand-query. Some computational complexity of this form is
unavoidable, as it is NP-hard for truthful mechanisms to guarantee even an
-approximation for any [Dobzinski and
Vondr\'ak, 2016]. Together, these establish a stark distinction between
computationally-efficient and communication-efficient truthful mechanisms.
We show that this distinction disappears with a mild relaxation of
truthfulness, which we term implementation in advised strategies, and that has
been previously studied in relation to "Implementation in Undominated
Strategies" [Babaioff et al, 2009]. Specifically, advice maps a tentative
strategy either to that same strategy itself, or one that dominates it. We say
that a player follows advice as long as they never play actions which are
dominated by advice. A poly-time mechanism guarantees an -approximation
in implementation in advised strategies if there exists poly-time advice for
each player such that an -approximation is achieved whenever all
players follow advice. Using an appropriate bicriterion notion of approximate
demand queries (which can be computed in poly-time), we establish that (a
slight modification of) the [Assadi and Singla, 2019] mechanism achieves the
same -approximation in implementation in advised
strategies
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