Beyond Moulin mechanisms
成果类型：
Article; Proceedings Paper
署名作者：
Mehta, Aranyak; Roughgarden, Tim; Sundararajan, Mukund
署名单位：
Stanford University; Alphabet Inc.; Google Incorporated
刊物名称：
GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
ISSN/ISSBN：
0899-8256
DOI：
10.1016/j.geb.2008.06.005
发表日期：
2009
页码：
125-155
关键词：
摘要：
The only known general technique for designing truthful and approximately budget-balanced cost-sharing mechanisms with good efficiency or computational complexity properties is due to Moulin [1999. Incremental cost sharing: Characterization by coalition strategy-proofness. Soc. Choice Welfare 16 (2), 279-320]. For many fundamental cost-sharing applications, however, Moulin mechanisms provably suffer from poor budget-balance, poor economic efficiency, or both. We propose acyclic mechanisms, a new framework for designing truthful and approximately budget-balanced cost-sharing mechanisms. Acyclic mechanisms strictly generalize Moulin mechanisms and offer three important advantages. First, it is easier to design acyclic mechanisms than Moulin mechanisms: many classical primal-dual algorithms naturally induce a non-Moulin acyclic mechanism with good performance guarantees. Second, for important classes of cost-sharing problems, acyclic mechanisms have exponentially better budget-balance and economic efficiency than Moulin mechanisms. Finally, while Moulin mechanisms have found application primarily in binary demand games, we extend acyclic mechanisms to general demand games, a multi-parameter setting in which each bidder can be allocated one of several levels of service. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.