Optimal decision-making with minimal waste: strategyproof redistribution of VCG payments
AAMAS '06 Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
Worst-case optimal redistribution of VCG payments
Proceedings of the 8th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Better redistribution with inefficient allocation in multi-unit auctions with unit demand
Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Optimal-in-expectation redistribution mechanisms
Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - Volume 2
A budget-balanced, incentive-compatible scheme for social choice
AAMAS'04 Proceedings of the 6th AAMAS international conference on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce: theories for and Engineering of Distributed Mechanisms and Systems
Optimal-in-expectation redistribution mechanisms
Artificial Intelligence
Redistribution mechanisms for assignment of heterogeneous objects
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
Budget-balanced and nearly efficient randomized mechanisms: public goods and beyond
WINE'11 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Internet and Network Economics
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
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We study the problem of how to allocate m identical items among n m agents, assuming each agent desires exactly one item and has a private value for consuming it. We assume the items are jointly owned by the agents, not by one uninformed center, so an auction cannot be used to solve our problem. Instead, the agents who receive items compensate those who do not. This problem has been studied by others recently, and their solutions have modified the classic VCG mechanism. This approach guarantees strategy-proofness and allocative efficiency. Further, in an auction setting, VCG guarantees budget balance, because payments are absorbed by the auctioneer. In our setting, however, where payments are redistributed to the agents, some money must be burned in order to retain strategy-proofness. While strategy-proofness is necessary for truthful implementation, allocative efficiency (allocating the m items to those that desire them most), is not always an appropriate goal in our setting. Rather, we contend that maximizing social surplus is. In service of this goal, we study a class of mechanisms that may burn not only money but destroy items as well. Our key finding is that destroying items can save money, and hence lead to greater social surplus. More specifically, our first observation is that a mechanism is strategy-proof iff it admits a threshold representation. Given this observation, we restrict attention to specific threshold and payment functions for which we can numerically solve for an optimal mechanism. Whereas the worst-case ratio of the realized social surplus to the maximum possible is close to 1 when m = 1 and 0 when m = n -- 1 under the VCG mechanism, the best mechanism we find coincides with VCG when m = 1 but has a ratio approaching 1 when m = n -- 1 as n increases.