Algorithmic mechanism design (extended abstract)
STOC '99 Proceedings of the thirty-first annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
SODA '02 Proceedings of the thirteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
The Price of Truth: Frugality in Truthful Mechanisms
STACS '03 Proceedings of the 20th Annual Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science
SODA '04 Proceedings of the fifteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
True costs of cheap labor are hard to measure: edge deletion and VCG payments in graphs
Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Beyond VCG: Frugality of Truthful Mechanisms
FOCS '05 Proceedings of the 46th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Failures of the VCG mechanism in combinatorial auctions and exchanges
AAMAS '06 Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
Frugality ratios and improved truthful mechanisms for vertex cover
Proceedings of the 8th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Proceedings of the ninth international conference on Electronic commerce
SODA '07 Proceedings of the eighteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
Bounding the payment of approximate truthful mechanisms
ISAAC'04 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Algorithms and Computation
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In set system auctions, a single buyer needs to purchase services from multiple competing providers, and the set of providers has a combinatorial structure; a popular example is provided by shortest path auctions [1,7]. In [3] it has been observed that if such an auction is conducted using first-price rules, then, counterintuitively, the buyer's payment may go down if some of the sellers are prohibited from participating in the auction. This reduction in payments has been termed "the cost of cheap labor". In this paper, we demonstrate that the buyer can attain further savings by setting lower bounds on sellers' bids. Our model is a refinement of the original model of [3]: indeed, the latter can be obtained from the former by requiring these lower bounds to take values in {0, + 驴 }. We provide upper and lower bounds on the reduction in the buyer's payments in our model for various set systems, such as minimum spanning tree auctions, bipartite matching auctions, single path and k-path auctions, vertex cover auctions, and dominating set auctions. In particular, we illustrate the power of the new model by showing that for vertex cover auctions, in our model the buyer's savings can be linear, whereas in the original model of [3] no savings can be achieved.