We introduce a new class of mechanisms, robust mechanisms, that is an intermediary between ex-post mechanisms and Bayesian mechanisms. This new class of mechanisms allows the mechanism designer to incorporate imprecise estimates of the distribution over bidder valuations in a way that provides strong guarantees that the mechanism will perform at least as well as ex-post mechanisms, while in man...

This paper studies the mechanism design problem for the class of Bayesian environments where agents do care for the well-being of others. For these environments, we fully characterize interim efficient mechanisms and examine their properties. This set of mechanisms is compelling, since interim efficient mechanisms are the best in the sense that there is no other mechanism which generates unanim...

In the customary VCG (Vickrey-Clarke-Groves) mechanism truth-telling is a dominant strategy. In this paper we study the sequential VCG mechanism and show that other dominant strategies may then exist. We illustrate how this fact can be used to minimize taxes using examples concerned with Clarke tax and public projects.

Strategy() AbstractStrategy(in agent: AbstractTradingAgent) endOfRound(in auction: Auction) eventOccurred(in event: AuctionEvent) getAgent(): AbstractTradingAgent initialise() modifyShout(in shout: Shout, in auction: Auction): Shout modifyShout(in shout: MutableShout): boolean protoClone(): Object reset() setAgent(in agent: AbstractTradingAgent) AbstractStrategy determineQuantity(in auction: Au...

The optimal allocation of resources in complex environments—like allocation of dynamic wireless spectrum, cloud computing services, and Internet advertising—is computationally challenging even given the true preferences of the participants. In the theory and practice of optimization in complex environments, a wide variety of special and general purpose algorithms have been developed; these algo...

The aggregation of conflicting preferences is a central problem in multiagent systems. The key difficulty is that the agents may report their preferences insincerely. Mechanism de­ sign is the art of designing the rules of the game so that the agents are motivated to re­ port their preferences truthfully and a (so­ cially) desirable outcome is chosen. We pro­ pose an approach where a mechanism ...

We consider mechanism design issues for scheduling problems and we survey some recent developments on this important problem in Algorithmic Game Theory. We treat both the related and the unrelated version of the problem. 1 The scheduling problem The problem of scheduling unrelated machines [21, 14] is one of the most fundamental algorithmic problems: There are n machines and m tasks∗ and machin...

Mechanism design has traditionally focused almost exclusively on the design of truthful mechanisms. There are several drawbacks to this: 1. in certain settings (e.g. voting settings), no desirable strategyproof mechanisms exist; 2. truthful mechanisms are unable to take advantage of the fact that computationally bounded agents may not be able to find the best manipulation, and 3. when designing...

A mechanism is said to be renegotiation-proof if it is robust against renegotiation both before and after it is played. We ask (1) what kind of environments admit the renegotiation-proof implementation of some social choice rules? (2) for a given environment, what kind of social choice rule are implementable in a way that is renegotiationproof? and (3) for a given renegotiation-proof implementa...