顺序机制设计

Possible and Necessary Allocations via Sequential Mechanisms

A simple mechanism for allocating indivisible resources is sequential allocation in which agents take turns to pick items. We focus on possible and necessary allocation problems, checking whether allocations of a given form occur in some or all mechanisms for several commonly used classes of sequential allocation mechanisms. In particular, we consider whether a given agent receives a given item, a set of items, or a subset of items for five natural classes of sequential allocation mechanisms: balanced, recursively balanced, balanced alternating, strictly alternating and all policies. We identi…

Sequential Peer Prediction: Learning to Elicit Effort using Posted Prices

Peer prediction mechanisms are often adopted to elicit truthful contributions from crowd workers when no ground-truth verification is available. Recently, mechanisms of this type have been developed to incentivize effort exertion, in addition to truthful elicitation. In this paper, we study a sequential peer prediction problem where a data requester wants to dynamically determine the reward level to optimize the trade-off between the quality of information elicited from workers and the total expected payment. In this problem, workers have homogeneous expertise and heterogeneous cost for exerti…

多Agent系统中的顺序信息获取

Sequential Information Elicitation in Multi-Agent Systems

我们介绍了策略多智能体系统中的顺序信息获取的研究。在一个信息获取系统中，一个中心试图根据一组代理可以访问的私有信息（a-k-a秘密）来计算一个函数的值。我们考虑经典的多方计算设置，其中每个代理都有兴趣知道函数的结果。然而，在我们的设置中，每个代理都是战略性的，并且由于获取信息是昂贵的，代理可能会受到诱惑而不花费获得信息的努力，搭便车其他代理的计算。一种机制，它可以泄露代理的秘密，并执行所需的计算，定义了一个游戏。一个机制是“适当的”，如果存在一个平衡，它是能够引起（足够多）代理的秘密和执行的计算，为所有可能的秘密vectors.We特征的一般有效的程序，以确定一个适当的机制，如果这样的机制存在。此外，我们还解决了存在性问题，提供了一个多项式算法来验证存在一个适当的机制。

Welfare of Sequential Allocation Mechanisms for Indivisible Goods

Sequential allocation is a simple and attractive mechanism for the allocation of indivisible goods. Agents take turns, according to a policy, to pick items. Sequential allocation is guaranteed to return an allocation which is efficient but may not have an optimal social welfare. We consider therefore the relation between welfare and efficiency. We study the (computational) questions of what welfare is possible or necessary depending on the choice of policy. We also consider a novel control problem in which the chair chooses a policy to improve social welfare.

Reinforcement Learning of Sequential Price Mechanisms

We introduce the use of reinforcement learning for indirect mechanisms, working with the existing class of sequential price mechanisms, which generalizes both serial dictatorship and posted price mechanisms and essentially characterizes all strongly obviously strategyproof mechanisms. Learning an optimal mechanism within this class forms a partially-observable Markov decision process. We provide rigorous conditions for when this class of mechanisms is more powerful than simpler static mechanisms, for sufficiency or insufficiency of observation statistics for learning, and for the necessity of …

Sequential Persuasion Using Limited Experiments

Bayesian persuasion and its derived information design problem has been one of the main research agendas in the economics and computation literature over the past decade. However, when attempting to apply its model and theory, one is often limited by the fact that the sender can only implement very restricted information structures. Moreover, in this case, the sender can possibly achieve higher expected utility by performing a sequence of feasible experiments, where the choice of each experiment depends on the outcomes of all previous experiments. Indeed, it has been well observed that real li…

检验策略证明机制的简洁性

Testing the simplicity of strategy-proof mechanisms

本文通过实验比较了四种配给问题中的机制，发现提供实时反馈和顺序性游戏能提高性能，而明显策略证明机制未必有效。

使用顺序评审从作者处获取诚实信息

Eliciting Honest Information From Authors Using Sequential Review

提出顺序评审机制，在更现实的效用假设下诚实地从作者处获取论文质量排名信息，从而提高接收论文质量、减少评审工作量并激励作者撰写更少且更高质量的论文。