Truthful and Near-Optimal Mechanism Design via Linear Programming

We give a general technique to obtain approximation mechanisms that are truthful in expectation. We show that for packing domains, any α-approximation algorithm that also bounds the integrality gap of the LP relaxation of the problem by α can be used to construct an α-approximation mechanism that is truthful in expectation. This immediately yields a variety of new and significantly improved results for various problem domains and furthermore, yields truthful (in expectation) mechanisms with guarantees that match the best known approximation guarantees when truthfulness is not required. In particular, we obtain the first truthful mechanisms with approximation guarantees for a variety of multi-parameter domains. We obtain truthful (in expectation) mechanisms achieving approximation guarantees of O( √ m) for combinatorial auctions (CAs), (1+ ) for multiunit CAs with B = Ω(log m) copies of each item, and 2 for multi-parameter knapsack problems (multi-unit auctions). Our construct...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: FOCS
• Authors: Ron Lavi, Chaitanya Swamy
• Keywords: Approximation Guarantees, FOCS 2005, Theoretical Computer Science, Truthful, Truthful Mechanism