SODA '02 Proceedings of the thirteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
On Certain Connectivity Properties of the Internet Topology
FOCS '03 Proceedings of the 44th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations 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
Frugality ratios and improved truthful mechanisms for vertex cover
Proceedings of the 8th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Average-Case Analyses of Vickrey Costs
APPROX '09 / RANDOM '09 Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop and 13th International Workshop on Approximation, Randomization, and Combinatorial Optimization. Algorithms and Techniques
First-passage percolation on a width-2 strip and the path cost in a VCG auction
WINE'06 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Internet and Network Economics
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We study a generic task allocation problem called shortest paths: Let G be a directed graph in which the edges are owned by self interested agents. Each edge has an associated cost that is privately known to its owner. Let s and t be two distinguished nodes in G. Given a distribution on the edge costs, the goal isto design a mechanism (protocol) which acquires a cheap s-t path. We first prove that the class of generalized VCG mechanisms has certain monotonicity properties. We exploit this observation to obtain, under an independence assumption, expected payments whichare significantly better than the worst case bounds of. We then investigate whether these payments canbe improved when there is a competition among paths. Surprisingly, we give evidence to the fact that typically such competition hardly helps incentive compatible mechanisms. In particular, we show this for the celebrated VCG mechanism. We then construct anovel general protocol combining the advantages of incentive compatible and non-incentive compatible mechanisms. Under reasonable assumptions on the agents we show that the overpayment of our mechanism is very small. Finally, we demonstrate that many task allocation problems can be reduced to shortest paths.