Monotone circuits for connectivity require super-logarithmic depth
STOC '88 Proceedings of the twentieth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Communication complexity
Preference elicitation in combinatorial auctions
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM conference on Electronic Commerce
Iterative Combinatorial Auctions: Theory and Practice
Proceedings of the Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Twelfth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence
Some complexity questions related to distributive computing(Preliminary Report)
STOC '79 Proceedings of the eleventh annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Applying learning algorithms to preference elicitation
EC '04 Proceedings of the 5th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Preference Elicitation and Query Learning
The Journal of Machine Learning Research
Approximation algorithms for combinatorial auctions with complement-free bidders
Proceedings of the thirty-seventh annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
On the computational power of iterative auctions
Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
On the Computational Power of Demand Queries
SIAM Journal on Computing
Optimization with demand oracles
Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
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In the problem of finding an efficient allocation when agents' utilities are privately known, we examine the effect of restricting attention to mechanisms using "demand queries," which ask agents to report an optimal allocation given a price list. We construct a combinatorial allocation problem with m items and two agents whose valuations lie in a certain class, such that (i) efficiency can be obtained with a mechanism using O (m) bits, but (ii) any demand-query mechanism guaranteeing a higher efficiency than giving all items to one agent uses a number of queries that is exponential in m. The same is proven for any demand-query mechanism achieving an improvement in expected efficiency, for a constructed joint probability distribution over agents' valuations from the class. These results cast doubt on the usefulness of such common combinatorial allocation mechanisms as "iterative auctions" and other "preference elicitation" mechanisms using demand queries, as well as "value queries" and "order queries" (which are easily replicated with demand queries in our setting).