Erratum to "Vickrey Pricing and Shortest Paths: What is an Edge Worth?"
FOCS '02 Proceedings of the 43rd Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
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
On the difficulty of some shortest path problems
ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG)
Informational overhead of incentive compatibility
Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Characterizing truthful multi-armed bandit mechanisms: extended abstract
Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
The price of truthfulness for pay-per-click auctions
Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Computationally feasible VCG mechanisms
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
On the Power of Randomization in Algorithmic Mechanism Design
FOCS '09 Proceedings of the 2009 50th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Truthful mechanisms with implicit payment computation
Proceedings of the 11th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Black-Box Randomized Reductions in Algorithmic Mechanism Design
FOCS '10 Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE 51st Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
A dynamic axiomatic approach to first-price auctions
Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Multi-parameter mechanisms with implicit payment computation
Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM conference on Electronic commerce
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Truthfulness is fragile and demanding. It is oftentimes computationally harder than solving the original problem. Even worse, truthfulness can be utterly destroyed by small uncertainties in a mechanism's outcome. One obstacle is that truthful payments depend on outcomes other than the one realized, such as the lengths of non-shortest-paths in a shortest-path auction. Single-call mechanisms are a powerful tool that circumvents this obstacle --- they implicitly charge truthful payments, guaranteeing truthfulness in expectation using only the outcome realized by the mechanism. The cost of such truthfulness is a trade-off between the expected quality of the outcome and the risk of large payments. We largely settle when and to what extent single-call mechanisms are possible. The first single-call construction was discovered by Babaioff, Kleinberg, and Slivkins [2010] in single-parameter domains. They give a transformation that turns any monotone, single-parameter allocation rule into a truthful-in-expectation single-call mechanism. Our first result is a natural complement to[Babaioff et al. 2010]: we give a new transformation that produces a single-call VCG mechanism from any allocation rule for which VCG payments are truthful. Second, in both the single-parameter and VCG settings, we precisely characterize the possible transformations, showing that that a wide variety of transformations are possible but that all take a very simple form. Finally, we study the inherent trade-off between the expected quality of the outcome and the risk of large payments. We show that our construction and that of [Babaioff et al. 2010] simultaneously optimize a variety of metrics in their respective domains. Our study is motivated by settings where uncertainty in a mechanism renders other known techniques untruthful. As an example, we analyze pay-per-click advertising auctions, where the truthfulness of the standard VCG-based auction is easily broken when the auctioneer's estimated click-through-rates are imprecise.