Truthful approximation mechanisms for restricted combinatorial auctions

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Mu'alem, Ahuva; Nisan, Noam
• 署名单位: California Institute of Technology; Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2007.12.009
• 发表日期: 2008
• 页码: 612-631
• 关键词: Mechanism design; combinatorial auctions; Multi-unit auctions; Multi-unit combinatorial auctions; Approximation algorithms

摘要

When attempting to design a truthful mechanism for a computationally hard problem such as combinatorial auctions, one is faced with the problem that most efficiently computable heuristics can not be embedded in any truthful mechanism (e.g. VCG-like payment Riles will not ensure truthfulness). We develop a set of techniques that allow constructing efficiently computable truthful mechanisms for combinatorial auctions in the special case where each bidder desires a specific known subset of items and only the valuation is unknown by the mechanism (the single parameter case). For this case We extend the work of Lehmann, O'Callaghan, and Shoham, who presented greedy heuristics. We show how to Use If-Then-Else constructs, perform a partial search. and use the LP relaxation. We apply these techniques for several canonical types of combinatorial auctions. obtaining truthful mechanisms with provable approximation ratios. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.