56 research outputs found
Learning Valuation Distributions from Partial Observation
Auction theory traditionally assumes that bidders' valuation distributions
are known to the auctioneer, such as in the celebrated, revenue-optimal Myerson
auction. However, this theory does not describe how the auctioneer comes to
possess this information. Recently, Cole and Roughgarden [2014] showed that an
approximation based on a finite sample of independent draws from each bidder's
distribution is sufficient to produce a near-optimal auction. In this work, we
consider the problem of learning bidders' valuation distributions from much
weaker forms of observations. Specifically, we consider a setting where there
is a repeated, sealed-bid auction with bidders, but all we observe for each
round is who won, but not how much they bid or paid. We can also participate
(i.e., submit a bid) ourselves, and observe when we win. From this information,
our goal is to (approximately) recover the inherently recoverable part of the
underlying bid distributions. We also consider extensions where different
subsets of bidders participate in each round, and where bidders' valuations
have a common-value component added to their independent private values
Draft Auctions
We introduce draft auctions, which is a sequential auction format where at
each iteration players bid for the right to buy items at a fixed price. We show
that draft auctions offer an exponential improvement in social welfare at
equilibrium over sequential item auctions where predetermined items are
auctioned at each time step. Specifically, we show that for any subadditive
valuation the social welfare at equilibrium is an -approximation
to the optimal social welfare, where is the number of items. We also
provide tighter approximation results for several subclasses. Our welfare
guarantees hold for Bayes-Nash equilibria and for no-regret learning outcomes,
via the smooth-mechanism framework. Of independent interest, our techniques
show that in a combinatorial auction setting, efficiency guarantees of a
mechanism via smoothness for a very restricted class of cardinality valuations,
extend with a small degradation, to subadditive valuations, the largest
complement-free class of valuations. Variants of draft auctions have been used
in practice and have been experimentally shown to outperform other auctions.
Our results provide a theoretical justification
Privacy-Preserving Public Information for Sequential Games
In settings with incomplete information, players can find it difficult to
coordinate to find states with good social welfare. For example, in financial
settings, if a collection of financial firms have limited information about
each other's strategies, some large number of them may choose the same
high-risk investment in hopes of high returns. While this might be acceptable
in some cases, the economy can be hurt badly if many firms make investments in
the same risky market segment and it fails. One reason why many firms might end
up choosing the same segment is that they do not have information about other
firms' investments (imperfect information may lead to `bad' game states).
Directly reporting all players' investments, however, raises confidentiality
concerns for both individuals and institutions.
In this paper, we explore whether information about the game-state can be
publicly announced in a manner that maintains the privacy of the actions of the
players, and still suffices to deter players from reaching bad game-states. We
show that in many games of interest, it is possible for players to avoid these
bad states with the help of privacy-preserving, publicly-announced information.
We model behavior of players in this imperfect information setting in two ways
-- greedy and undominated strategic behaviours, and we prove guarantees on
social welfare that certain kinds of privacy-preserving information can help
attain. Furthermore, we design a counter with improved privacy guarantees under
continual observation
Private Pareto Optimal Exchange
We consider the problem of implementing an individually rational,
asymptotically Pareto optimal allocation in a barter-exchange economy where
agents are endowed with goods and have preferences over the goods of others,
but may not use money as a medium of exchange. Because one of the most
important instantiations of such economies is kidney exchange -- where the
"input"to the problem consists of sensitive patient medical records -- we ask
to what extent such exchanges can be carried out while providing formal privacy
guarantees to the participants. We show that individually rational allocations
cannot achieve any non-trivial approximation to Pareto optimality if carried
out under the constraint of differential privacy -- or even the relaxation of
\emph{joint} differential privacy, under which it is known that asymptotically
optimal allocations can be computed in two-sided markets, where there is a
distinction between buyers and sellers and we are concerned only with privacy
of the buyers~\citep{Matching}. We therefore consider a further relaxation that
we call \emph{marginal} differential privacy -- which promises, informally,
that the privacy of every agent is protected from every other agent so long as does not collude or share allocation information with other
agents. We show that, under marginal differential privacy, it is possible to
compute an individually rational and asymptotically Pareto optimal allocation
in such exchange economies
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