Implementation in Advised Strategies: Welfare Guarantees from Posted-Price Mechanisms when Demand Queries are NP-hard

TL;DR

This paper introduces a relaxed notion of truthfulness called implementation in advised strategies, showing that welfare guarantees of posted-price mechanisms for submodular bidders can be maintained with polynomial-time advice, despite NP-hard demand queries.

Contribution

It demonstrates that welfare guarantees of posted-price mechanisms can be preserved under a relaxed strategic framework using advice, bridging the gap caused by NP-hard demand queries.

Findings

Achieves $O((\log \log m)^3)$-approximation in advised strategies

Introduces poly-time advice for demand queries

Shows welfare guarantees hold under relaxed strategic implementation

Abstract

State-of-the-art posted-price mechanisms for submodular bidders with $m$ items achieve approximation guarantees of $O((\log \log m)^3)$ [Assadi and Singla, 2019]. Their truthfulness, however, requires bidders to compute an NP-hard demand-query. Some computational complexity of this form is unavoidable, as it is NP-hard for truthful mechanisms to guarantee even an $m^{1/2-\varepsilon}$-approximation for any $\varepsilon > 0$ [Dobzinski and Vondr\'ak, 2016]. Together, these establish a stark distinction between computationally-efficient and communication-efficient truthful mechanisms. We show that this distinction disappears with a mild relaxation of truthfulness, which we term implementation in advised strategies, and that has been previously studied in relation to "Implementation in Undominated Strategies" [Babaioff et al, 2009]. Specifically, advice maps a tentative strategy either to that same strategy itself, or one that dominates it. We say that a player follows advice as long as they never play actions which are dominated by advice. A poly-time mechanism guarantees an $\alpha$-approximation in implementation in advised strategies if there exists poly-time advice for each player such that an $\alpha$-approximation is achieved whenever all players follow advice. Using an appropriate bicriterion notion of approximate demand queries (which can be computed in poly-time), we establish that (a slight modification of) the [Assadi and Singla, 2019] mechanism achieves the same $O((\log \log m)^3)$-approximation in implementation in advised strategies.