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
Beyond VCG: Frugality of Truthful Mechanisms
FOCS '05 Proceedings of the 46th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Frugality ratios and improved truthful mechanisms for vertex cover
Proceedings of the 8th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Algorithmic Game Theory
On the price of truthfulness in path auctions
WINE'07 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Internet and network economics
Frugal and Truthful Auctions for Vertex Covers, Flows and Cuts
FOCS '10 Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE 51st Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Frugal Mechanism Design via Spectral Techniques
FOCS '10 Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE 51st Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
We study set-system auctions whereby a single buyer wants to purchase Q items of some commodity. There are multiple sellers, each of whom has some known number of items, and a private cost for supplying those items. Thus a "feasible set" of sellers (a set that is able to comprise the winning bidders) is any set of sellers whose total quantity sums to at least Q. We show that, even in a limited special case, VCG has a frugality ratio of at least n−1 (with respect to the NTUmin benchmark) and that this matches the upper bound for any set-system auction. We show a lower bound on the frugality of any truthful mechanism of $\sqrt{Q}$ in this setting and give a truthful mechanism with a frugality ratio of $2\sqrt{Q}$. However, we show that similar types of 'scaling' mechanism, in the general (integer) case, give a frugality ratio of at least ${{4Qe^{-2}}\over{{\rm In}^2Q}}$.