Ex-Post Optimal Knapsack Procurement

Jarman, Felix; Meisner, Vincent

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2548543

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…These works also point out the advantages of the DA framework in obtaining budget balance for double auctions. In a similar spirit, Ensthaler and Giebe [13] and Jarman and Meisner [20] point out the advantages of the DA auctions in the design of budget-constrained procurement auctions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 86%

Deferred-Acceptance Auctions for Multiple Levels of Service

Gkatzelis

Markakis

Roughgarden

2017

Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation

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Deferred-acceptance (DA) auctions are mechanisms that are based on backward-greedy algorithms and possess a number of remarkable incentive properties, including implementation as an obviously-strategyproof ascending auction. All existing work on DA auctions considers only binary single-parameter problems, where each bidder either "wins" or "loses. " This paper generalizes the DA auction framework to non-binary settings, and applies this generalized framework to obtain approximately welfare-maximizing DA auctions for a number of basic mechanism design problems: multiunit auctions, problems with polymatroid constraints or multiple knapsack constraints, and the problem of scheduling jobs to minimize their total weighted completion time. Our results require the design of novel backward-greedy algorithms with good approximation guarantees. CCS Concepts: • Theory of computation → Approximation algorithms analysis; Algorithmic game theory and mechanism design;

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 86%

Deferred-Acceptance Auctions for Multiple Levels of Service

Gkatzelis

Markakis

Roughgarden

2017

Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation

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“…Budget-feasible clock auctions Prior to this work, there were only a few examples of budgetfeasible clock auctions in the literature. Ensthaler and Giebe [15] and Jarman and Meisner [21] focused on the very special case where v(S) = |S|. Badanidiyuru et al [6] and Balkanski and Hartline [7] designed budget-feasible posted-price mechanisms, which are a special type of clock auction, but the former only obtained a O(log n) approximation for monotone submodular valuations and the latter considered a Bayesian setting where the costs are drawn from a prior distribution known to the auctioneer.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another important limitation of the previously proposed budget-feasible mechanisms is that the vast majority of them heavily rely on randomization, making it unlikely that they would be used in practice: on one hand, bidders can find the notion of randomization and its impact confusing and, on the other hand, it can be hard to verify that the resulting outcome is indeed the product of the prescribed randomization [26,21]. Furthermore, the performance bounds of randomized mechanisms are guaranteed only in expectation rather than ex-post.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deterministic Budget-Feasible Clock Auctions

Balkanski

Garimidi

Gkatzelis

et al. 2021

Preprint

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We revisit the well-studied problem of budget-feasible procurement, where a buyer with a strict budget constraint seeks to acquire services from a group of strategic providers (the sellers). During the last decade, several strategyproof budget-feasible procurement auctions have been proposed, aiming to maximize the value of the buyer, while eliciting each seller's true cost for providing their service. These solutions predominantly take the form of randomized sealedbid auctions: they ask the sellers to report their private costs and then use randomization to determine which subset of services will be procured and how much each of the chosen providers will be paid, ensuring that the total payment does not exceed the buyer's budget. Our main result in this paper is a novel method for designing budget-feasible auctions, leading to solutions that outperform the previously proposed auctions in multiple ways.First, our solutions take the form of descending clock auctions, and thus satisfy a list of very appealing properties, such as obvious strategyproofness, group strategyproofness, transparency, and unconditional winner privacy; this makes these auctions much more likely to be used in practice. Second, in contrast to previous results that heavily depend on randomization, our auctions are deterministic. As a result, we provide an affirmative answer to one of the main open questions in this literature, asking whether a deterministic strategyproof auction can achieve a constant approximation when the buyer's valuation function is submodular over the set of services. In addition to this, we also provide the first deterministic budget-feasible auction that matches the approximation bound of the best-known randomized auction for the class of subadditive valuations. Finally, using our method, we improve the best-known approximation factor for monotone submodular valuations, which has been the focus of most of the prior work.

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“…Depending on the application, imposing constraints ex-post instead of interim or ex-ante is more suitable. We use our result in Jarman and Meisner (2016), where a procurer can only spend a fixed budget, i.e., the budget must suffice for any outcome of the mechanism. Alternatively, limited liability or the possibility of default motivate an ex-post participation constraint.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%