Truth revelation in approximately efficient combinatorial auctions
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Solving concisely expressed combinatorial auction problems
Eighteenth national conference on Artificial intelligence
Miscomputing ratio: social cost of selfish computing
AAMAS '03 Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
Mechanism design for software agents with complete information
Decision Support Systems - Special issue: Decision theory and game theory in agent design
Mechanism design and deliberative agents
Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
Reducing costly information acquisition in auctions
AAMAS '06 Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
Designing auctions for deliberative agents
AAMAS'04 Proceedings of the 6th AAMAS international conference on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce: theories for and Engineering of Distributed Mechanisms and Systems
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The theory of mechanism design deals with the design of protocols for non-cooperative multi-agent systems. A major task of this theory is the design of protocols that will maximize the social welfare of the agents. An ideal mechanism will optimize social welfare and will be strategy-proof, i.e. the dominant strategy of each agent will be to participate in the mechanism and to reveal his true goal and worth, as well as budget-balanced, i.e., the mechanism should not impose any payments from the center/organizer to the agents. Indeed, the Clarke's mechanism, which is central to information economics and to games with incomplete information, satisfies these properties. However, we show that the Clarke's mechanism employs the use of procedures for optimizing social welfare, which are NP-hard. Hence, these procedures should be replaced by heuristics. We present a set of natural properties (axioms) of such heuristics that, when satisfied, enable to obtain the desired strategy-proofness and budget balance properties. Our result enables to extend the central protocol of the theory of mechanism design to the context of resource-bounded agents.