There has been much recent work on the revenue-raising properties of truthful mechanisms for selling goods to selfish bidders. Typically the revenue of a mechanism is compared against a benchmark (such as, the maximum revenue obtainable by an omniscient seller selling at a fixed price to at least two customers), with a view to understanding how much lower the mechanism's revenue is than the benchmark, in the worst case. We study this issue in the context of lotteries , where the seller may sell a probability of winning an item. We are interested in two general issues. Firstly, we aim at using the true optimum revenue as benchmark for our auctions. Secondly, we study the extent to which the expressive power resulting from lotteries, helps to improve the worst-case ratio. We study this in the well-known context of digital goods , where the production cost is zero. We show that in this scenario, collusion-resistant lotteries (these are lotteries for which no coalition of bidders exchanging side payments has an advantage in lying) are as powerful as truthful ones.
Truthful lotteries defined above naturally relate to the truthful auctions for digital goods considered in @cite_7 . The authors of @cite_7 show that no deterministic truthful auction can guarantee a reasonable approximation of @math and therefore focus on universally truthful auctions. However, they also show that these auctions fail to guarantee any constant approximation of @math (cf. Lemma 3.5 in @cite_7 ) and therefore the benchmark of interest becomes @math . They define an interesting auction called Random Sampling Optimal Price (RSOP, for short) and prove that RSOP gives a (quite weak) constant approximation of @math ; they also conjecture the right constant to be @math . Better bounds are then proved in @cite_2 @cite_1 ; the latter work proves the conjecture when the number of winners is at least 6 and in general for two-valued domains.
@cite_1 @cite_7 @cite_2
2950708966 1964005287 2177723277 2269992556
One of the fundamental questions of Algorithmic Mechanism Design is whether there exists an inherent clash between truthfulness and computational tractability: in particular, whether polynomial-time truthful mechanisms for combinatorial auctions are provably weaker in terms of approximation ratio than non-truthful ones. This question was very recently answered for universally truthful mechanisms for combinatorial auctions D11 , and even for truthful-in-expectation mechanisms DughmiV11 . However, both of these results are based on information-theoretic arguments for valuations given by a value oracle, and leave open the possibility of polynomial-time truthful mechanisms for succinctly described classes of valuations. This paper is the first to prove computational hardness results for truthful mechanisms for combinatorial auctions with succinctly described valuations. We prove that there is a class of succinctly represented submodular valuations for which no deterministic truthful mechanism provides an @math -approximation for a constant @math , unless @math ( @math denotes the number of items). Furthermore, we prove that even truthful-in-expectation mechanisms cannot approximate combinatorial auctions with certain succinctly described submodular valuations better than within @math , where @math is the number of bidders and @math some absolute constant, unless @math . In addition, we prove computational hardness results for two related problems. We study a class of single round, sealed bid auctions for items in unlimited supply such as digital goods. We focus on auctions that are truthful and competitive. Truthful auctions encourage bidders to bid their utility; competitive auctions yield revenue within a constant factor of the revenue for optimal fixed pricing. We show that for any truthful auction, even a multi-price auction, the expected revenue does not exceed that for optimal fixed pricing. We also give a bound on how far the revenue for optimal fixed pricing can be from the total market utility. We show that several randomized auctions are truthful and competitive under certain assumptions, and that no truthful deterministic auction is competitive. We present simulation results which confirm that our auctions compare favorably to fixed pricing. Some of our results extend to bounded supply markets, for which we also get truthful and competitive auctions. In the context of auctions for digital goods, an interesting Random Sampling Optimal Price auction (RSOP) has been proposed by Goldberg, Hartline and Wright; this leads to a truthful mechanism. Since random sampling is a popular approach for auctions that aims to maximize the seller's revenue, this method has been analyzed further by Feige, Flaxman, Hartline and Kleinberg, who have shown that it is 15-competitive in the worst case -- which is substantially better than the previously proved bounds but still far from the conjectured competitive ratio of 4. In this paper, we prove that RSOP is indeed 4-competitive for a large class of instances in which the number λ of bidders receiving the item at the optimal uniform price, is at least 6. We also show that it is 4.68 competitive for the small class of remaining instances thus leaving a negligible gap between the lower and upper bound. Furthermore, we develop a robust version of RSOP -- one in which the seller's revenue is, with high probability, not much below its mean -- when the above parameter λ grows large. We employ a mix of probabilistic techniques and dynamic programming to compute these bounds. We study digital-goods auctions for items in unlimited supply introduced by Goldberg, Hartline and Wright. Since no deterministic algorithms are competitive for this class of auctions, one of the central research issues is how to obtain a nice probabilistic distribution over truthful algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a rather systematic approach to this goal: Consider for example the Sampling Cost Share (SCS) auction. It is well known that SCS works well if the the current bid vector produces many winners against F(2), the standard benchmark algorithm for competitive analysis. In fact, its competitive ratio is approaching to 2.0 as k (= the number of F(2) winners) grows. On the other hand, its competitive ratio becomes as bad as 4.0 for k = 2. Our new approach is to develop a sequence of similar cost-share type algorithms, DCSk, which work well for small k. Now we choose a sufficiently large constant N and run DCS1, DCS2, ..., DCSN and SCS with probabilities p1, p2, ..., pN and q, respectively. It should be noted that we can use LP to obtain optimal p1, p2,..., pN and q. By this averaging method, we can improve the competitive ratio of SCS from 4.0 to 3.531 and that of the currently best Aggregated γ3 algorithm due to Hartline and McGrew from 3.243 to 3.119.