Strongly Budget Balanced Auctions for Multi-Sided Markets
Rica Gonen, Erel Segal-Halevi
备注：
Preliminary version accepted to AAAI 2020. This version adds (1) External competition auction for arbitrary recipe vectors; (2) Obvious-truthfulness proof; (3) Simulation experiments
In two-sided markets, Myerson and Satterthwaite's impossibility theorem states that one can not maximize the gain-from-trade while also satisfying truthfulness, individual-rationality and no deficit. Attempts have been made to circumvent Myerson and Satterthwaite's result by attaining approximately-maximum gain-from-trade: the double-sided auctions of McAfee (1992) is truthful and has no deficit, and the one by Segal-Halevi et al. (2016) additionally has no surplus --- it is strongly-budget-balanced. They consider two categories of agents --- buyers and sellers, where each trade set is composed of a single buyer and a single seller. The practical complexity of applications such as supply chain require one to look beyond two-sided markets. Common requirements are for: buyers trading with multiple sellers of different or identical items, buyers trading with sellers through transporters and mediators, and sellers trading with multiple buyers. We attempt to address these settings. We generalize Segal-Halevi et al. (2016)'s strongly-budget-balanced double-sided auction setting to a multilateral market where each trade set is composed of any number of agent categories. Our generalization refines the notion of competition in multi-sided auctions by introducing the concepts of external competition and trade reduction. We also show an obviously-truthful implementation of our auction using multiple ascending prices.
Double sided auctions are widely used in financial markets to match demand and supply. Prior works on double sided auctions have focused primarily on single quantity trade requests. We extend various notions of double sided auctions to incorporate multiple quantity trade requests and provide fully formalized matching algorithms for double sided auctions with their correctness proofs. We establish new uniqueness theorems that enable automatic detection of violations in an exchange program by comparing its output with that of a verified program. All proofs are formalized in the Coq proof assista…
In this paper, we present a new model and two mechanisms for auctions in two-sided markets of buyers and sellers, where budget constraints are imposed on buyers. Our model incorporates polymatroidal environments, and is applicable to a wide variety of models that include multiunit auctions, matching markets and reservation exchange markets. Our mechanisms are build on polymatroidal network flow model by Lawler and Martel, and enjoy various nice properties such as incentive compatibility of buyers, individual rationality, pareto optimality, strong budget balance. The first mechanism is a simple…
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Mechanism design for one-sided markets has been investigated for several decades in economics and in computer science. More recently, there has been an increased attention on mechanisms for two-sided markets, in which buyers and sellers act strategically. For two-sided markets, an impossibility result of Myerson and Satterthwaite states that no mechanism can simultaneously satisfy individual rationality (IR), incentive compatibility (IC), strong budget-balance (SBB), and be efficient. On the other hand, important applications to web advertisement, stock exchange, and frequency spectrum allocat…
In a seminal paper, McAfee (1992) presented the first dominant strategy truthful mechanism for double auction. His mechanism attains nearly optimal gain-from-trade when the market is sufficiently large. However, his mechanism may leave money on the table, since the price paid by the buyers may be higher than the price paid to the sellers. This money is included in the gain-from-trade and in some cases it accounts for almost all the gain-from-trade, leaving almost no gain-from-trade to the traders. We present SBBA: a variant of McAfee's mechanism which is strongly budget-balanced. There is a si…
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In a seminal paper, McAfee (1992) presented a truthful mechanism for double auctions, attaining asymptotically-optimal gain-from-trade without any prior information on the valuations of the traders. McAfee's mechanism handles single-parametric agents, allowing each seller to sell a single unit and each buyer to buy a single unit. This paper presents a double-auction mechanism that handles multi-parametric agents and allows multiple units per trader, as long as the valuation functions of all traders have decreasing marginal returns. The mechanism is prior-free, ex-post individually-rational, do…
We design novel mechanisms for welfare-maximization in two-sided markets. That is, there are buyers willing to purchase items and sellers holding items initially, both acting rationally and strategically in order to maximize utility. Our mechanisms are designed based on a powerful correspondence between two-sided markets and prophet inequalities. They satisfy individual rationality, dominant-strategy incentive compatibility, budget-balance constraints and give constant-factor approximations to the optimal social welfare. We improve previous results in several settings: Our main focus is on mat…
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We introduce a formal framework for analyzing trades in financial markets. An exchange is where multiple buyers and sellers participate to trade. These days, all big exchanges use computer algorithms that implement double sided auctions to match buy and sell requests and these algorithms must abide by certain regulatory guidelines. For example, market regulators enforce that a matching produced by exchanges should be \emph{fair}, \emph{uniform} and \emph{individual rational}. To verify these properties of trades, we first formally define these notions in a theorem prover and then give formal p…
We consider the problem of welfare maximization in two-sided markets using simple mechanisms that are prior-independent. The Myerson-Satterthwaite impossibility theorem shows that even for bilateral trade, there is no feasible (IR, truthful, budget balanced) mechanism that has welfare as high as the optimal-yet-infeasible VCG mechanism, which attains maximal welfare but runs a deficit. On the other hand, the optimal feasible mechanism needs to be carefully tailored to the Bayesian prior, and is extremely complex, eluding a precise description. We present Bulow-Klemperer-style results to circum…
Mechanism design on social networks is a hot research direction recently, and we have seen many interesting results in auctions and matching. Compared to the traditional settings, the new goal of the network settings is that we need to design incentives to incentivize the participants of the game to invite their neighbors on the network to join the game. This is challenging because they are competing for something (e.g., resources or matches) in the game. In one-sided matching, especially house exchange, the well-known unique truthful, stable and optimal solution called Top Trading Cycle (TTC)…
Federated learning (FL) represents a promising distributed machine learning paradigm that allows smart devices to collaboratively train a shared model via providing local data sets. However, problems considering multiple co-existing FL services and different types of service providers are rarely studied. In this paper, we investigate a multiple FL service trading problem in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-aided networks, where FL service demanders (FLSDs) aim to purchase various data sets from feasible clients (smart devices, e.g., smartphones, smart vehicles), and model aggregation services fro…
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We design simple mechanisms to approximate the Gains from Trade (GFT) in two-sided markets with multiple unit-supply sellers and multiple unit-demand buyers. A classical impossibility result by Myerson and Satterthwaite showed that even with only one seller and one buyer, no Individually Rational (IR), Bayesian Incentive Compatible (BIC) and Budget-Balanced (BB) mechanism can achieve full GFT (trade whenever buyer's value is higher than the seller's cost). On the other hand, they proposed the "second-best" mechanism that maximizes the GFT subject to IR, BIC and BB constraints, which is unfortu…
Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) is an emerging business model driven by the concept of "Everything-as-a-Service" and enabled through mobile internet technologies. In the context of economic deregulation, a MaaS system consists of a typical two-sided market, where travelers and transportation service providers (TSPs) are two groups of agents interacting with each other through a MaaS platform. In this study, we propose a modeling and optimization framework for the regulation of two-sided MaaS markets. We consider a name-your-own-price (NYOP)-auction mechanism where travelers submit purchase-bids t…
The seminal impossibility result of Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983) states that for bilateral trade, there is no mechanism that is individually rational (IR), incentive compatible (IC), weakly budget balanced, and efficient. This has led follow-up work on two-sided trade settings to weaken the efficiency requirement and consider approximately efficient simple mechanisms, while still demanding the other properties. The current state-of-the-art of such mechanisms for two-sided markets can be categorized as giving one (but not both) of the following two types of approximation guarantees on the g…
This paper is about allocation of an infinitely divisible good to several rational and strategic agents. The allocation is done by a social planner who has limited information because the agents' valuation functions are taken to be private information known only to the respective agents. We allow only a scalar signal, called a bid, from each agent to the social planner. Yang and Hajek [Jour. on Selected Areas in Comm., 2007] as well as Johari and Tsitsiklis [Jour. of Oper. Res., 2009] proposed a scalar strategy Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (SSVCG) mechanism with efficient Nash equilibria. We consider…
We introduce a formal framework for analyzing trades in financial markets. These days, all big exchanges use computer algorithms to match buy and sell requests and these algorithms must abide by certain regulatory guidelines. For example, market regulators enforce that a matching produced by exchanges should be fair, uniform and individual rational. To verify these properties of trades, we first formally define these notions in a theorem prover and then develop many important results about matching demand and supply. Finally, we use this framework to verify properties of two important classes …
