This paper concerns the mechanism design for online resource allocation in a strategic setting. In this setting, a single supplier allocates capacity-limited resources to requests that arrive in a sequential and arbitrary manner. Each request is associated with an agent who may act selfishly to misreport the requirement and valuation of her request. The supplier charges payment from agents whose requests are satisfied, but incurs a load-dependent supply cost. The goal is to design an incentive compatible online mechanism, which determines not only the resource allocation of each request, but also the payment of each agent, so as to (approximately) maximize the social welfare (i.e., aggregate valuations minus supply cost). We study this problem under the framework of competitive analysis. The major contribution of this paper is the development of a unified approach that achieves the best-possible competitive ratios for setups with different supply costs. Specifically, we show that when there is no supply cost or the supply cost function is linear, our model is essentially a standard 0-1 knapsack problem, for which our approach achieves logarithmic competitive ratios that match the state-of-the-art (which is optimal). For the more challenging setup when the supply cost is strictly-convex, we provide online mechanisms, for the first time, that lead to the optimal competitive ratios as well. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach that unifies the characterization of optimal competitive ratios in online resource allocation for different setups including zero, linear and strictly-convex supply costs.
In this paper, we study a general online linear programming problem whose formulation encompasses many practical dynamic resource allocation problems, including internet advertising display applications, revenue management, various routing, packing, and auction problems. We propose a model, which under mild assumptions, allows us to design near-optimal learning-based online algorithms that do not require the a priori knowledge about the total number of online requests to come, a first of its kind. We then consider two variants of the problem that relax the initial assumptions imposed on the pr…
We study the performance of a best reply algorithm for online resource allocation problems with a diseconomy of scale. In an online resource allocation problem, we are given a set of resources and a set of requests that arrive in an online manner. Each request consists of a set of feasible allocations and an allocation is a set of resources. The total cost of an allocation vector is given by the sum of the resources' costs, where each resource's cost depends on the total load on the resource under the allocation vector. We analyze the natural online procedure where each request is allocated gr…
We study an online version of the max-min fair allocation problem for indivisible items. In this problem, items arrive one by one, and each item must be allocated irrevocably on arrival to one of $n$ agents, who have additive valuations for the items. Our goal is to make the least happy agent as happy as possible. In research on the topic of online allocation, this is a fundamental and natural problem. Our main result is to reveal the asymptotic competitive ratios of the problem for both the adversarial and i.i.d. input models. We design a polynomial-time deterministic algorithm that is asympt…
Some online advertising offers pay only when an ad elicits a response. Randomness and uncertainty about response rates make showing those ads a risky investment for online publishers. Like financial investors, publishers can use portfolio allocation over multiple advertising offers to pursue revenue while controlling risk. Allocations over multiple offers do not have a distinct winner and runner-up, so the usual second-price mechanism does not apply. This paper develops a pricing mechanism for portfolio allocations. The mechanism is efficient, truthful, and rewards offers that reduce risk.
In this work, we study the problem of online mechanism design for resources allocation and pricing in cloud computing (RAPCC). We show that in general the allocation problems in RAPCC are NP-hard, and therefore we focus on designing dominant-strategy incentive compatible (DSIC) mechanisms with good competitive ratios compared to the offline optimal allocation (with the prior knowledge about the future jobs). We propose two kinds of DSIC online mechanisms. The first mechanism, which is based on a greedy allocation rule and leverages a priority function for allocation, is very fast and has a tig…
We study the problem of allocating $T$ sequentially arriving items among $n$ homogeneous agents under the constraint that each agent must receive a pre-specified fraction of all items, with the objective of maximizing the agents' total valuation of items allocated to them. The agents' valuations for the item in each round are assumed to be i.i.d. but their distribution is a priori unknown to the central planner. Therefore, the central planner needs to implicitly learn these distributions from the observed values in order to pick a good allocation policy. However, an added challenge here is tha…
Cainiao Network（菜鸟网络）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
In this paper, we investigate the online allocation problem of maximizing the overall revenue subject to both lower and upper bound constraints. Compared to the extensively studied online problems with only resource upper bounds, the two-sided constraints affect the prospects of resource consumption more severely. As a result, only limited violations of constraints or pessimistic competitive bounds could be guaranteed. To tackle the challenge, we define a measure of feasibility $ξ^*$ to evaluate the hardness of this problem, and estimate this measurement by an optimization routine with theoret…
A set of divisible resources becomes available over a sequence of rounds and needs to be allocated immediately and irrevocably. Our goal is to distribute these resources to maximize fairness and efficiency. Achieving any non-trivial guarantees in an adversarial setting is impossible. However, we show that normalizing the agent values, a very common assumption in fair division, allows us to escape this impossibility. Our main result is an online algorithm for the case of two agents that ensures the outcome is envy-free while guaranteeing 91.6% of the optimal social welfare. We also show that th…
We prove the following results for task allocation of indivisible resources: - The problem of finding a leximin-maximal resource allocation is in P if the agents have max-utility functions and atomic demands. - Deciding whether a resource allocation is Pareto-optimal is coNP-complete for agents with (1-)additive utility functions. - Deciding whether there exists a Pareto-optimal and envy-free resource allocation is Sigma_2^p-complete for agents with (1-)additive utility functions.
Every computer system -- from schedulers in clouds (e.g. Amazon) to computer networks to operating systems -- performs resource allocation across system users. The defacto allocation policies are max-min fairness (MMF) for single resources and dominant resource fairness (DRF) for multiple resources which guarantee properties like incentive compatibility, envy-freeness, and Pareto efficiency, assuming user demands are static (time-independent). However, in real-world systems, user demands are dynamic, i.e. time-dependant. As a result, there is now a fundamental mismatch between the goals of com…
For multiple emergencies caused by natural disasters, it is crucial to allocate resources equitably to each emergency location, especially when the availability of resources is limited in quantity. This paper has developed a multi-event crisis management system using a non-cooperative, complete information, strategic form game model. In the proposed system, each emergency event is assumed to occur in different locations simultaneously. These locations are represented as the players in the game, competing with the other players for an optimal allocation of scarce resources available at differen…
We consider the problem of fairly allocating items to a set of individuals, when the items are arriving online. A central solution concept in fair allocation is competitive equilibrium: every individual is endowed with a budget of faux currency, and the resulting competitive equilibrium is used to allocate. For the online fair allocation context, the PACE algorithm of Gao et al. [2021] leverages the dual averaging algorithm to approximate competitive equilibria. The authors show that, when items arrive i.i.d, the algorithm asymptotically achieves the fairness and efficiency guarantees of the o…
Yachay Tech University（亚查伊理工大学）；Gallaudet University（加劳德特大学）；Universidad de Los Andes - Mérida（洛斯安第斯大学梅里达分校）
We use an algebraic viewpoint, namely a matrix framework to deal with the problem of resource allocation under uncertainty in the context of a qualitative approach. Our basic qualitative data are a plausibility relation over the resources, a hierarchical relation over the agents and of course the preference that the agents have over the resources. With this data we propose a qualitative binary relation $\unrhd$ between allocations such that $\mathcal{F}\unrhd \mathcal{G}$ has the following intended meaning: the allocation $\mathcal{F}$ produces more or equal social welfare than the allocation …
In networking and computing, resource allocation is typically addressed using classical sharing protocols as, for instance, the proportional division rule, the max-min fair allocation , or other solutions inspired by cooperative game theory. In this paper, we argue that, describing the resource allocation problem as a cooperative game, such classical resource allocation approaches, as well as associated notions of fairness, show important limitations. We identify in the individual satisfaction rate the key aspect of the challenge of defining a new notion of fairness and, consequently, a resour…
Today's intelligent computing environments, including Internet of Things, cloud computing and fog computing, allow many organizations around the world to optimize their resource allocation regarding time and energy consumption. Due to the sensitive conditions of utilizing resources by users and the real-time nature of the data, a comprehensive and integrated computing environment has not yet been able to provide a robust and reliable capability for proper resource allocation. Although, traditional methods of resource allocation in a low-capacity hardware resource system are efficient for small…
In this paper we formulate the fixed budget resource allocation game to understand the performance of a distributed market-based resource allocation system. Multiple users decide how to distribute their budget (bids) among multiple machines according to their individual preferences to maximize their individual utility. We look at both the efficiency and the fairness of the allocation at the equilibrium, where fairness is evaluated through the measures of utility uniformity and envy-freeness. We show analytically and through simulations that despite being highly decentralized, such a system con…
In this work, we are interested on the analysis of competing marketing campaigns between an incumbent who dominates the market and a challenger who wants to enter the market. We are interested in (a) the simultaneous decision of how many resources to allocate to their potential customers to advertise their products for both marketing campaigns, and (b) the optimal allocation on the situation in which the incumbent knows the entrance of the challenger and thus can predict its response. Applying results from game theory, we characterize these optimal strategic resource allocations for the voter …
Dominant resource fairness (DRF) is a popular mechanism for multi-resource allocation in cloud computing systems. In this paper, we consider a problem of multi-resource fair allocation with bounded number of tasks. Firstly, we propose the lexicographically max-min normalized share (LMMNS) fair allocation mechanism, which is a natural generalization of DRF, and design a non-trivial optimal algorithm to find a LMMNS fair allocation, whose running time is linear in the number of users. Secondly, we prove that LMMNS satisfies envy-freeness (EF) and group strategy-proofness (GSP), and analysis the …
We model Monroe's and Chamberlin and Courant's multiwinner voting systems as a certain resource allocation problem. We show that for many restricted variants of this problem, under standard complexity-theoretic assumptions, there are no constant-factor approximation algorithms. Yet, we also show cases where good approximation algorithms exist (briefly put, these variants correspond to optimizing total voter satisfaction under Borda scores, within Monroe's and Chamberlin and Courant's voting systems).
Given an initial resource allocation, where some agents may envy others or where a different distribution of resources might lead to higher social welfare, our goal is to improve the allocation without reassigning resources. We consider a sharing concept allowing resources being shared with social network neighbors of the resource owners. To this end, we introduce a formal model that allows a central authority to compute an optimal sharing between neighbors based on an initial allocation. Advocating this point of view, we focus on the most basic scenario where a resource may be shared by two n…
We show that, in a resource allocation problem, the ex ante aggregate utility of players with cumulative-prospect-theoretic preferences can be increased over deterministic allocations by implementing lotteries. We formulate an optimization problem, called the system problem, to find the optimal lottery allocation. The system problem exhibits a two-layer structure comprised of a permutation profile and optimal allocations given the permutation profile. For any fixed permutation profile, we provide a market-based mechanism to find the optimal allocations and prove the existence of equilibrium pr…
