Sharing the cost of multicast transmissions
Journal of Computer and System Sciences - Special issue on Internet algorithms
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
Optimal mechanism design and money burning
STOC '08 Proceedings of the fortieth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Better redistribution with inefficient allocation in multi-unit auctions with unit demand
Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Efficiency and redistribution in dynamic mechanism design
Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Undominated VCG redistribution mechanisms
Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - Volume 2
Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Achieving budget-balance with Vickrey-based payment schemes in exchanges
IJCAI'01 Proceedings of the 17th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2
Complexity of mechanism design
UAI'02 Proceedings of the Eighteenth conference on Uncertainty in artificial intelligence
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
Expressive markets for donating to charities
Artificial Intelligence
Budget-balanced and nearly efficient randomized mechanisms: public goods and beyond
WINE'11 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Internet and Network Economics
Constrained automated mechanism design for infinite games of incomplete information
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
Hi-index | 0.00 |
Many important problems in multiagent systems involve the allocation of multiple resources among the agents. If agents are self-interested, they will lie about their valuations for the resources if they perceive this to be in their interest. The well-known VCG mechanism allocates the items efficiently, is strategy-proof (agents have no incentive to lie), and never runs a deficit. Nevertheless, the agents may have to make large payments to a party outside the system of agents, leading to decreased utility for the agents. Recent work has investigated the possibility of redistributing some of the payments back to the agents, without violating the other desirable properties of the VCG mechanism. Previous research on redistribution mechanisms has resulted in a worst-case optimal redistribution mechanism, that is, a mechanism that maximizes the fraction of VCG payments redistributed in the worst case. In contrast, in this paper, we assume that a prior distribution over the agents' valuations is available, and our goal is to maximize the expected total redistribution. In the first part of this paper, we study multi-unit auctions with unit demand. We analytically solve for a mechanism that is optimal among linear redistribution mechanisms. We also propose discretized redistribution mechanisms. We show how to automatically solve for the optimal discretized redistribution mechanism for a given discretization step size, and show that the resulting mechanisms converge to optimality as the step size goes to zero. We present experimental results showing that for auctions with many bidders, the optimal linear redistribution mechanism redistributes almost everything, whereas for auctions with few bidders, we can solve for the optimal discretized redistribution mechanism with a very small step size. In the second part of this paper, we study multi-unit auctions with nonincreasing marginal values. We extend the notion of linear redistribution mechanisms, previously defined only in the unit demand setting, to this more general setting. We introduce a linear program for finding the optimal linear redistribution mechanism. This linear program is unwieldy, so we also introduce one simplified linear program that produces relatively good linear redistribution mechanisms. We conjecture an analytical solution for the simplified linear program.