scholarly journals Incentive-Compatible in Dominant Strategies Mechanism Design for an Assembler under Asymmetric Information

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 479-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhaolin Li ◽  
Jennifer K. Ryan ◽  
Lusheng Shao ◽  
Daewon Sun
Author(s):  
Vijay Menon ◽  
Kate Larson

We study the classic cake cutting problem from a mechanism design perspective, in particular focusing on deterministic mechanisms that are strategyproof and fair. We begin by looking at mechanisms that are non-wasteful and primarily show that for even the restricted class of piecewise constant valuations there exists no direct-revelation mechanism that is strategyproof and even approximately proportional. Subsequently, we remove the non-wasteful constraint and show another impossibility result stating that there is no strategyproof and approximately proportional direct-revelation mechanism that outputs contiguous allocations, again, for even the restricted class of piecewise constant valuations. In addition to the above results, we also present some negative results when considering an approximate notion of strategyproofness, show a connection between direct-revelation mechanisms and mechanisms in the Robertson-Webb model when agents have piecewise constant valuations, and finally also present a (minor) modification to the well-known Even-Paz algorithm that has better incentive-compatible properties for the cases when there are two or three agents.


Econometrica ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 1367-1390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yi-Chun Chen ◽  
Wei He ◽  
Jiangtao Li ◽  
Yeneng Sun

We consider a general social choice environment that has multiple agents, a finite set of alternatives, independent types, and atomless type distribution. We show that for any Bayesian incentive compatible mechanism, there exists an equivalent deterministic mechanism that (1) is Bayesian incentive compatible; (2) delivers the same interim expected allocation probabilities and the same interim expected utilities for all agents; and (3) delivers the same ex ante expected social surplus. This result holds in settings with a rich class of utility functions, multidimensional types, interdependent valuations, and in settings without monetary transfers. To prove our result, we develop a novel methodology of mutual purification, and establish its link with the mechanism design literature.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 511-544 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomoya Kazumura ◽  
Debasis Mishra ◽  
Shigehiro Serizawa

This paper studies a model of mechanism design with transfers where agents' preferences need not be quasilinear. In such a model, (i) we characterize dominant strategy incentive compatible mechanisms using a monotonicity property, (ii) we establish a revenue uniqueness result (for every dominant strategy implementable allocation rule, there is a unique payment rule that can implement it), and (iii) we show that every dominant strategy incentive compatible, individually rational, and revenue‐maximizing mechanism must charge zero payment for the worst alternative (outside option). These results are applicable in a wide variety of problems (single object auction, multiple object auction, public good provision, etc.) under suitable richness of type space. In particular, our results are applicable to two important type spaces: (a) type space containing an arbitrarily small perturbation of quasilinear type space and (b) type space containing all positive income effect preferences.


Author(s):  
Dimitris Fotakis ◽  
Kyriakos Lotidis ◽  
Chara Podimata

We study incentive compatible mechanisms for Combinatorial Auctions where the bidders have submodular (or XOS) valuations and are budget-constrained. Our objective is to maximize the liquid welfare, a notion of efficiency for budgetconstrained bidders introduced by Dobzinski and Paes Leme (2014). We show that some of the known truthful mechanisms that best-approximate the social welfare for Combinatorial Auctions with submodular bidders through demand query oracles can be adapted, so that they retain truthfulness and achieve asymptotically the same approximation guarantees for the liquid welfare. More specifically, for the problem of optimizing the liquid welfare in Combinatorial Auctions with submodular bidders, we obtain a universally truthful randomized O(log m)-approximate mechanism, where m is the number of items, by adapting the mechanism of Krysta and Vöcking (2012).Additionally, motivated by large market assumptions often used in mechanism design, we introduce a notion of competitive markets and show that in such markets, liquid welfare can be approximated within a constant factor by a randomized universally truthful mechanism. Finally, in the Bayesian setting, we obtain a truthful O(1)-approximate mechanism for the case where bidder valuations are generated as independent samples from a known distribution, by adapting the results of Feldman, Gravin and Lucier (2014).


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