Self-interested automated mechanism design and implications for optimal combinatorial auctions

Often, an outcome must be chosen on the basis of the preferences reported by a group of agents. The key difficulty is that the agents may report their preferences insincerely to make the chosen outcome more favorable to themselves. Mechanism design is the art of designing the rules of the game so that the agents are motivated to report their preferences truthfully, and a desirable outcome is chosen. In a recently proposed approach—called automated mechanism design—a mechanism is computed for the preference aggregation setting at hand. This has several advantages, but the downside is that the mechanism design optimization problem needs to be solved anew each time. Unlike the earlier work on automated mechanism design that studied a benevolent designer, in this paper we study automated mechanism design problems where the designer is self-interested. In this case, the center cares only about which outcome is chosen and what payments are made to it. The reason that the agents’ prefe...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: SIGECOM
• Authors: Vincent Conitzer, Tuomas Sandholm
• Keywords: Mechanism Design, Mechanism Design Optimization, Preferences, SIGECOM 2004