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arXiv 1206.3541cs.GT
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近似最优拍卖的简单经济学

The Simple Economics of Approximately Optimal Auctions

Saeed Alaei, Hu Fu, Nima Haghpanah, Jason Hartline

摘要:

利润通过边际收益最大化而最优化的直觉是微观经济学的指导原则。在具有线性效用和一维偏好的代理人的经典拍卖理论中,Bulow和Roberts(1989)表明,Myerson(1981)的最优拍卖实际上是优化边际收益。特别是迈尔森的虚拟价值,正是一个适当的收入曲线的衍生物。本文研究了多智能体多维非线性偏好环境下的机制设计问题。了解这些环境下的好拍卖被认为是贝叶斯最优机制设计的主要挑战。在这些环境中,最大化边际收益可能不是最优的,有时没有直接的方法来实现边际收益最大化。我们的贡献有三个方面:我们的特点的设置,边际收入最大化是最佳的(通过确定一个重要的条件,我们称之为收入线性),我们给出了简单的程序,实现边际收入最大化的一般,我们表明,边际收入最大化是近似最优的。我们的近似因子在一个量化环境离理想(边际收入最大化是最优的)有多远的术语中平滑地下降。由于边际收益机制是最佳的单维代理,我们的推广立即近似扩展了许多单维代理的结果。贝叶斯算法机制设计中最大的开放问题之一是开发在代理类型空间的大小上不具有蛮力的方法。我们的方法确定了一个子问题,例如,对于具有从产品分布中提取的值的单位需求代理,启用在维度上为多项式的近似机制。

英文摘要:

The intuition that profit is optimized by maximizing marginal revenue is a guiding principle in microeconomics. In the classical auction theory for agents with linear utility and single-dimensional preferences, Bulow and Roberts (1989) show that the optimal auction of Myerson (1981) is in fact optimizing marginal revenue. In particular Myerson's virtual values are exactly the derivative of an appropriate revenue curve. This paper considers mechanism design in environments where the agents have multi-dimensional and non-linear preferences. Understanding good auctions for these environments is considered to be the main challenge in Bayesian optimal mechanism design. In these environments maximizing marginal revenue may not be optimal and there is sometimes no direct way to implement the marginal revenue maximization. Our contributions are three fold: we characterize the settings for which marginal revenue maximization is optimal (by identifying an important condition that we call revenue linearity), we give simple procedures for implementing marginal revenue maximization in general, and we show that marginal revenue maximization is approximately optimal. Our approximation factor smoothly degrades in a term that quantifies how far the environment is from ideal (where marginal revenue maximization is optimal). Because the marginal revenue mechanism is optimal for single-dimensional agents, our generalization immediately approximately extends many results for single-dimensional agents. One of the biggest open questions in Bayesian algorithmic mechanism design is developing methodologies that are not brute-force in the size of the agent type space. Our methods identify a subproblem that, e.g., for unit-demand agents with values drawn from product distributions, enables approximation mechanisms that are polynomial in the dimension.

机构、总结、中文摘要均由AI分析而来,可能存在错误,请以论文正文为准。

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