Communication Separations for Truthful Auctions: Breaking the Two-Player Barrier

TL;DR

This paper investigates the communication complexity of truthful combinatorial auctions with subadditive or single-minded valuations, revealing exponential communication requirements for certain approximation guarantees with three bidders, and highlighting a gap between truthful and non-truthful protocols.

Contribution

It establishes the first exponential lower bounds for truthful mechanisms with three bidders in this setting, extending the taxation complexity framework beyond previous two-bidder limitations.

Findings

Deterministic truthful mechanisms need exponential communication for 0.366-approximation with three bidders.

Non-truthful protocols can achieve 0.5-approximation with polynomial communication.

A gap exists between truthful and non-truthful auction protocols in this context.

Abstract

We study the communication complexity of truthful combinatorial auctions, and in particular the case where valuations are either subadditive or single-minded, which we denote with $\mathsf{SubAdd}\cup\mathsf{SingleM}$. We show that for three bidders with valuations in $\mathsf{SubAdd}\cup\mathsf{SingleM}$, any deterministic truthful mechanism that achieves at least a $0.366$-approximation requires $\exp(m)$ communication. In contrast, a natural extension of [Fei09] yields a non-truthful $\mathrm{poly}(m)$-communication protocol that achieves a $\frac{1}{2}$-approximation, demonstrating a gap between the power of truthful mechanisms and non-truthful protocols for this problem. Our approach follows the taxation complexity framework laid out in [Dob16b], but applies this framework in a setting not encompassed by the techniques used in past work. In particular, the only successful prior application of this framework uses a reduction to simultaneous protocols which only applies for two bidders [AKSW20], whereas our three-player lower bounds are stronger than what can possibly arise from a two-player construction (since a trivial truthful auction guarantees a $\frac{1}{2}$-approximation for two players).