Truth Revelation in Approximately Efficient Combinatorial Auctions
Daniel Lehmann, Liadan Ita O'Callaghan, Yoav Shoham

TL;DR
This paper examines how approximate solutions in combinatorial auctions affect truthfulness, showing that standard payment schemes may fail and proposing alternative schemes that ensure truthfulness for certain players.
Contribution
It introduces a new payment scheme that guarantees truthfulness in combinatorial auctions when only approximate solutions are feasible, extending the understanding of mechanism design under computational constraints.
Findings
GVA payment scheme does not ensure truthfulness with approximate solutions
A new payment scheme guarantees truthfulness for a restricted class of players
Identifies natural properties that imply truthfulness in combinatorial auctions
Abstract
Some important classical mechanisms considered in Microeconomics and Game Theory require the solution of a difficult optimization problem. This is true of mechanisms for combinatorial auctions, which have in recent years assumed practical importance, and in particular of the gold standard for combinatorial auctions, the Generalized Vickrey Auction (GVA). Traditional analysis of these mechanisms - in particular, their truth revelation properties - assumes that the optimization problems are solved precisely. In reality, these optimization problems can usually be solved only in an approximate fashion. We investigate the impact on such mechanisms of replacing exact solutions by approximate ones. Specifically, we look at a particular greedy optimization method. We show that the GVA payment scheme does not provide for a truth revealing mechanism. We introduce another scheme that does…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsAuction Theory and Applications · Economic theories and models · Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing
