On the Futility of Dynamics in Robust Mechanism Design

We consider a principal who repeatedly interacts with a strategic agent holding private information. In each round, the agent observes an idiosyncratic shock drawn independently and identically from a distribution known to the agent but not to the principal. The utilities of the principal and the agent are determined by the values of the shock and outcomes that are chosen by the principal based on reports made by the agent. When the principal commits to a dynamic mechanism, the agent best-responds to maximize his aggregate utility over the whole time horizon. The principal’s goal is to design a dynamic mechanism to minimize his worst-case regret, that is, the largest difference possible between the aggregate utility he could obtain if he knew the agent’s distribution and the actual aggregate utility he obtains. We identify a broad class of games in which the principal’s optimal mechanism is static without any meaningful dynamics. The optimal dynamic mechanism, if it exists, simply repeats an optimal mechanism for a single-round problem in each round. The minimax regret is the number of rounds times the minimax regret in the single-round problem. The class of games includes repeated selling of identical copies of a single good or multiple goods, repeated principal-agent relationships with hidden information, and repeated allocation of a resource without money. Outside this class of games, we construct examples in which a dynamic mechanism provably outperforms any static mechanism.

An Exact Algorithm for Large-Scale Continuous Nonlinear Resource Allocation Problems with Minimax Regret Objectives

We study a large-scale resource allocation problem with a convex, separable, not necessarily differentiable objective function that includes uncertain parameters falling under an interval uncertainty set, considering a set of deterministic constraints. We devise an exact algorithm to solve the minimax regret formulation of this problem, which is NP-hard, and we show that the proposed Benders-type decomposition algorithm converges to an [Formula: see text]-optimal solution in finite time. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm via an extensive computational study, and our results show that the proposed algorithm provides efficient solutions to large-scale problems, especially when the objective function is differentiable. Although the computation time takes longer for problems with nondifferentiable objective functions as expected, we show that good quality, near-optimal solutions can be achieved in shorter runtimes by using our exact approach. We also develop two heuristic approaches, which are partially based on our exact algorithm, and show that the merit of the proposed exact approach lies in both providing an [Formula: see text]-optimal solution and providing good quality near-optimal solutions by laying the foundation for efficient heuristic approaches.

Online Learning over a Finite Action Set with Limited Switching

This paper studies the value of switching actions in the Prediction From Experts problem (PFE) and Adversarial Multiarmed Bandits problem (MAB). First, we revisit the well-studied and practically motivated setting of PFE with switching costs. Many algorithms achieve the minimax optimal order for both regret and switches in expectation; however, high probability guarantees are an open problem. We present the first algorithms that achieve this optimal order for both quantities with high probability. This also implies the first high probability guarantees for several other problems, and, in particular, is efficiently adaptable to online combinatorial optimization with limited switching. Next, to investigate the value of switching actions more granularly, we introduce the switching budget setting, which limits algorithms to a fixed number of (costless) switches. Using this result and several reductions, we unify previous work and completely characterize the complexity of this switching budget setting up to small polylogarithmic factors: for both PFE and MAB, for all switching budgets, and for both expectation and high probability guarantees. Interestingly, as the switching budget decreases, the minimax regret rate admits a phase transition for PFE but not for MAB. These results recover and generalize the known minimax rates for the (arbitrary) switching cost setting.