Sangam: A Confluence of Knowledge Streams

Understanding Incentives: Mechanism Design Becomes Algorithm Design

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dc.contributor Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
dc.contributor Cai, Yang
dc.contributor Daskalakis, Konstantinos
dc.contributor Weinberg, Seth Matthew
dc.creator Cai, Yang
dc.creator Daskalakis, Konstantinos
dc.creator Weinberg, Seth Matthew
dc.date 2015-11-20T18:32:58Z
dc.date 2015-11-20T18:32:58Z
dc.date 2013-10
dc.date.accessioned 2023-03-01T18:06:59Z
dc.date.available 2023-03-01T18:06:59Z
dc.identifier 978-0-7695-5135-7
dc.identifier 0272-5428
dc.identifier http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/99969
dc.identifier Cai, Yang, Constantinos Daskalakis, and S. Matthew Weinberg. “Understanding Incentives: Mechanism Design Becomes Algorithm Design.” 2013 IEEE 54th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (October 2013).
dc.identifier https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5451-0490
dc.identifier.uri http://localhost:8080/xmlui/handle/CUHPOERS/278806
dc.description We provide a computationally efficient black-box reduction from mechanism design to algorithm design in very general settings. Specifically, we give an approximation-preserving reduction from truthfully maximizing any objective under arbitrary feasibility constraints with arbitrary bidder types to (not necessarily truthfully) maximizing the same objective plus virtual welfare (under the same feasibility constraints). Our reduction is based on a fundamentally new approach: we describe a mechanism's behavior indirectly only in terms of the expected value it awards bidders for certain behavior, and never directly access the allocation rule at all. Applying our new approach to revenue, we exhibit settings where our reduction holds both ways. That is, we also provide an approximation-sensitive reduction from (non-truthfully) maximizing virtual welfare to (truthfully) maximizing revenue, and therefore the two problems are computationally equivalent. With this equivalence in hand, we show that both problems are NP-hard to approximate within any polynomial factor, even for a single monotone sub modular bidder. We further demonstrate the applicability of our reduction by providing a truthful mechanism maximizing fractional max-min fairness.
dc.description National Science Foundation (U.S.) (CAREER Award CCF-0953960)
dc.description National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Award CCF-1101491)
dc.description Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Fellowship)
dc.description Microsoft Research (Faculty Fellowship)
dc.description National Science Foundation (U.S.). Graduate Research Fellowship
dc.format application/pdf
dc.language en_US
dc.publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
dc.relation http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/FOCS.2013.72
dc.relation Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE 54th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
dc.rights Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
dc.rights http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
dc.source arXiv
dc.title Understanding Incentives: Mechanism Design Becomes Algorithm Design
dc.type Article
dc.type http://purl.org/eprint/type/ConferencePaper


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