A Truthful Randomized Mechanism for Combinatorial Public Projects via Convex Optimization

In Combinatorial Public Projects, there is a set of projects that may be undertaken, and a set of selfinterested players with a stake in the set of projects chosen. A public planner must choose a subset of these projects, subject to a resource constraint, with the goal of maximizing social welfare. Combinatorial Public Projects has emerged as one of the paradigmatic problems in Algorithmic Mechanism Design, a field concerned with solving fundamental resource allocation problems in the presence of both selfish behavior and the computational constraint of polynomial-time. We design a polynomial-time, truthful-in-expectation, (1 − 1/e)-approximation mechanism for welfare maximization in a fundamental variant of combinatorial public projects. Our results apply to combinatorial public projects when players have valuations that are matroid rank sums (MRS), which encompass most concrete examples of submodular functions studied in this context, including coverage functions, matroid weight...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Shaddin Dughmi
• Keywords: Algorithmic Mechanism Design, Combinatorial Public Projects, Constant Factor Approximation, CORR 2011, Education