Optimizing over Serial Dictatorships
Ioannis Caragiannis, Nidhi Rathi

TL;DR
This paper investigates the effectiveness of serial dictatorship mechanisms in combinatorial optimization, providing bounds, algorithms, and truthfulness considerations for approximating social welfare.
Contribution
It introduces query-efficient algorithms for serial dictatorship in combinatorial problems, achieving tight bounds and 2-approximation in specific domains, and discusses truthfulness and solution quality measures.
Findings
Polynomial query algorithms achieve tight bounds on social welfare.
Simple algorithms yield 2-approximations for matchings, arborescences, and Boolean satisfiability.
Some algorithms can be implemented truthfully with VCG-like payments.
Abstract
Motivated by the success of the serial dictatorship mechanism in social choice settings, we explore its usefulness in tackling various combinatorial optimization problems. We do so by considering an abstract model, in which a set of agents are asked to act in a particular ordering, called the action sequence. Each agent acts in a way that gives her the maximum possible value, given the actions of the agents who preceded her in the action sequence. Our goal is to compute action sequences that yield approximately optimal total value to the agents (a.k.a., social welfare). We assume query access to the value that the agent i gets when she acts after the agents in the ordered set . We establish tight bounds on the social welfare that can be achieved using polynomially many queries. Even though these bounds show a marginally sublinear approximation of optimal social welfare in…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAuction Theory and Applications · Game Theory and Voting Systems · Complexity and Algorithms in Graphs
