Mechanisms for complement-free procurement

Dobzinski, Shahar; Papadimitriou, Christos H.; Singer, Yoram

doi:10.1145/1993574.1993615

Cited by 52 publications

(103 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…An alternative notion is that of budget feasible mechanism design initiated by Singer [2010] where the goal is to optimize a utility function under a hard budget constraint. This concept enables surprisingly positive results and has been studied in algorithmic mechanism design [Chen et al 2011;Dobzinski et al 2011;Badanidiyuru et al 2012;Bei et al 2012;Anari et al 2014] and used in various application domains that include social network analysis [Singer 2012], crowdsourcing [Yang et al 2012;Singer and Mittal 2013;Singla and Krause 2013b] and privacy auctions [Dandekar et al 2013;Singla and Krause 2013a]. The setting that we study most resembles that of budget feasible mechanism design.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In standard mechanism design settings, the costs are private information and agents are strategic. In such scenarios a reasonable approach is to design truthful mechanisms that have desirable guarantees [Singer 2010;Kempe et al 2010;Chen et al 2010Chen et al , 2011Dobzinski et al 2011;Badanidiyuru et al 2012;Bei et al 2012;Anari et al 2014]. In this paper we consider settings in which the agents' costs are known to the mechanism designer, and truthfulness is therefore not the design objective.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mechanisms for Fair Attribution

Balkanski

Singer

2015

Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation

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We propose a new framework for optimization under fairness constraints. The problems we consider model procurement where the goal is to optimize a buyer's utility while paying sellers in a manner that reflects their contribution to the buyer's utility. The payment rules we consider are natural interpretations of fairness based on concepts such as Shapley values and the nucleolus from cooperative game theory. The question in this setting is whether the outcome (measured in terms of the buyer's utility) produced by mechanisms that enforce fair payments is competitive with the outcome of a mechanism that simply pays agents their costs and is not committed to fair payments. Our main result shows that there exists a mechanism which guarantees a solution whose value is at least one third of the optimal unfair solution for any submodular utility function, and that this ratio is optimal. We discuss several special cases for which this approximation ratio can be improved and natural extensions.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mechanisms for Fair Attribution

Balkanski

Singer

2015

Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation

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“…Our problem is also investigated by computer scientists such as Dobzinski, Papadimitriou, and Singer (2011). However, instead of specifying the private information optimum they search for an algorithmic mechanism that approximates the full information optimum within specific bounds.…”

Section: Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Ex-Post Optimal Knapsack Procurement

Jarman

Meisner

2015

SSRN Journal

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We consider a budget-constrained mechanism designer who wants to select an optimal subset of projects to maximize her utility. Project costs are private information and the value the designer derives from their provision may vary. In this allocation problem the choice of projects -both which and how many -is endogenously determined by the mechanism. The designer faces hard ex-post constraints: The participation and budget constraint must hold for each possible outcome while the mechanism must be implementable in dominant strategies. We derive the class of optimal mechanisms that are characterized by cutoff functions. These cutoff functions exhibit properties that allow an implementation through a descending clock auction. Only in the case of symmetric projects price clocks descend synchronously such that always the cheapest projects are executed. However, the asymmetric case, where values or costs are asymmetrically distributed, features a novel tradeoff between quantity and quality. Interestingly, this tradeoff mitigates the distortion due to the informational asymmetry compared to environments where quantity is exogenous.JEL-Classification: D02, D44, D45, D82, H57.

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“…For subadditive utility functions budget feasible mechanisms with polylogarithmic approximation ratios were presented in [Dobzinski et al 2011]. Bei et al give a mechanism with a sublogarithmic approximation ratio, and a mechanism with a constant factor approximation ratio for a class known as fractionally subadditive functions [Bei et al 2012].…”

Section: Beyond Submodularitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Budget feasible mechanism design

Singer

2014

SIGecom Exch.

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In this letter we sketch a brief introduction to budget feasible mechanism design. This framework captures scenarios where the goal is to buy items or services from strategic agents under budget. The setting introduces interesting challenges that arise from the tension between incentive compatibility and the budget constraint, and leaves many interesting open questions. We will discuss several application domains that include crowdsourcing, information dissemination in social networks, and privacy-preserving recommendation systems.

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Mechanisms for complement-free procurement

Cited by 52 publications

References 15 publications

Mechanisms for Fair Attribution

Mechanisms for Fair Attribution

Ex-Post Optimal Knapsack Procurement

Budget feasible mechanism design

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