Towards More Practical Linear Programming-based Techniques for Algorithmic Mechanism Design

TL;DR

This paper proposes replacing the Ellipsoid method with the faster multiplicative weights update method in linear programming-based algorithmic mechanism design, balancing efficiency with slightly weaker guarantees.

Contribution

It introduces a simplified, more practical approach for truthful mechanism design using multiplicative weights, improving efficiency over previous methods.

Findings

Faster implementation using multiplicative weights.

Maintains approximate truthfulness and efficiency.

Trade-off with slightly weaker approximation guarantees.

Abstract

R. Lavy and C. Swamy (FOCS 2005, J. ACM 2011) introduced a general method for obtaining truthful-in-expectation mechanisms from linear programming based approximation algorithms. Due to the use of the Ellipsoid method, a direct implementation of the method is unlikely to be efficient in practice. We propose to use the much simpler and usually faster multiplicative weights update method instead. The simplification comes at the cost of slightly weaker approximation and truthfulness guarantees.