Single-Call Mechanisms

Following Babaioff, Kleinberg, and Slivkins [4], we study single-call mechanisms — truthful mechanisms that evaluate an allocation function only once per instantiation. First, we show that single-call mechanisms are possible for maximal-in-distributional-range (MIDR) allocation rules, i.e. computing truthful payments is essentially as easy as computing a single allocation. We give a procedure that transforms a multi-parameter MIDR allocation rule into a truthful in expectation mechanism that makes a single black-box call to the allocation function. The resulting mechanism gives

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Balasubramanian Sivan, Christopher A. Wilkens
• Keywords: Allocation Function, Allocation Rule, CORR 2010, Education, Single-call Mechanisms