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On characterizations of truthful mechanisms for combinatorial auctions and scheduling

Published: 08 July 2008 Publication History

Abstract

We characterize truthful mechanisms in two multi-parameter domains. The first characterization shows that every mechanism for combinatorial auctions with two subadditive bidders that always allocates all items is an affine maximizer. The second result shows that every truthful machine scheduling mechanism for 2 unrelated machines that yields a finite approximation of the minimum makespan, must be task independent. That is, the mechanism must determine the allocation of each job separately.
The characterizations improve our understanding of these multi-parameter settings and have new implications regarding the approximability of central problems in algorithmic mechanism design.

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  1. On characterizations of truthful mechanisms for combinatorial auctions and scheduling

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    EC '08: Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
    July 2008
    332 pages
    ISBN:9781605581699
    DOI:10.1145/1386790
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    Publication History

    Published: 08 July 2008

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    Author Tags

    1. characterizations
    2. combinatorial auctions
    3. incentive compatibility
    4. scheduling

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    EC '08
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    EC '08: ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
    July 8 - 12, 2008
    Il, Chicago, USA

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 664 of 2,389 submissions, 28%

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