On the minimum diameter spanning tree problem
Information Processing Letters
Davenport-Schinzel sequences and their geometric applications
Davenport-Schinzel sequences and their geometric applications
Algorithmic mechanism design (extended abstract)
STOC '99 Proceedings of the thirty-first annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Algorithms, games, and the internet
STOC '01 Proceedings of the thirty-third annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Computing shortest paths with comparisons and additions
SODA '02 Proceedings of the thirteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
Distributed algorithmic mechanism design: recent results and future directions
DIALM '02 Proceedings of the 6th international workshop on Discrete algorithms and methods for mobile computing and communications
Finding the most vital node of a shortest path
Theoretical Computer Science - Computing and combinatorics
Truthful approximation mechanisms for restricted combinatorial auctions: extended abstract
Eighteenth national conference on Artificial intelligence
Vickrey Prices and Shortest Paths: What is an Edge Worth?
FOCS '01 Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Truthful Mechanisms for One-Parameter Agents
FOCS '01 Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Towards truthful mechanisms for binary demand games: a general framework
Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
A truthful mechanism for the non-utilitarian minimum radius spanning tree problem
Proceedings of the seventeenth annual ACM symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures
STACS'99 Proceedings of the 16th annual conference on Theoretical aspects of computer science
A truthful (2 - 2/k)-approximation mechanism for the steiner tree problem with k terminals*
COCOON'05 Proceedings of the 11th annual international conference on Computing and Combinatorics
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One of the main challenges in algorithmic mechanism design is to turn (existing) efficient algorithmic solutions into efficient truthful mechanisms. Building a truthful mechanism is indeed a difficult process since the underlying algorithm must obey certain ''monotonicity'' properties and suitable payment functions need to be computed (this task usually represents the bottleneck in the overall time complexity). We provide a general technique for building truthful mechanisms that provide optimal solutions in strongly polynomial time. We show that the entire mechanism can be obtained if one is able to express/write a strongly polynomial-time algorithm (for the corresponding optimization problem) as a ''suitable combination'' of simpler algorithms. This approach applies to a wide class of mechanism design graph problems, where each selfish agent corresponds to a weighted edge in a graph (the weight of the edge is the cost of using that edge). Our technique can be applied to several optimization problems which prior results cannot handle (e.g., MIN-MAX optimization problems). As an application, we design the first (strongly polynomial-time) truthful mechanism for the minimum diameter spanning tree problem, by obtaining it directly from an existing algorithm for solving this problem. For this non-utilitarian MIN-MAX problem, no truthful mechanism was known, even considering those running in exponential time (indeed, exact algorithms do not necessarily yield truthful mechanisms). Also, standard techniques for payment computations may result in a running time which is not polynomial in the size of the input graph. The overall running time of our mechanism, instead, is polynomial in the number n of nodes and m of edges, and it is only a factor O(n@a(n,n)) away from the best known canonical centralized algorithm.