Mechanisms with Referrals: VCG Mechanisms and Multilevel Mechanisms

EPIC Mechanisms and VCG

Undominated VCG redistribution mechanisms

Many important problems in multiagent systems can be seen as resource allocation problems. For such problems, the well-known Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism is efficient, incentive compatible, individually rational, and does not incur a deficit. However, the VCG mechanism is not (strongly) budget balanced: generally, the agents’ payments will sum to more than 0. Very recently, several mec...

GROWRANGE: Anytime VCG-Based Mechanisms

We introduce anytime mechanisms for distributed optimization with self-interested agents. Anytime mechanisms retain good incentive properties even when interrupted before the optimal solution is computed, and provide better quality solutions when given additional time. Anytime mechanisms can solve easy instances of a hard problem quickly and optimally, while providing approximate solutions on v...

A Ex-Post Equilibrium and VCG Mechanisms

Consider an abstract social choice setting with incomplete information, where the number of alternatives is large. Albeit natural, implementing VCG mechanisms is infeasible due to the prohibitive communication constraints. However, if players restrict attention to a subset of the alternatives, feasibility may be recovered. This paper characterizes the class of subsets which induce an ex-post eq...

Designing truthful online mechanisms beyond VCG

Dominance truthful bidding is one of the most desirable features in auction design. In the offline setting, a common technique for ensuring truthful bidding is to start with the VickreyClarke-Groves(VCG) mechanism. However, many difficulties arise when implementing this scheme to an online auction. The main purpose of this paper is to survey recent literature aimed at designing truthful mechani...