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Budget-Balanced and Nearly Efficient Randomized Mechanisms: Public Goods and Beyond

Guo, M and Naroditskiy, Victor and Conitzer, V and Greenwald, Amy and Jennings, Nicholas R (2011) Budget-Balanced and Nearly Efficient Randomized Mechanisms: Public Goods and Beyond. Proc. of the 7th Workshop on Internet and Network Economics. (In Press)

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Abstract

Many scenarios where participants hold private information require payments to encourage truthful revelation. Some of these scenarios have no natural residual claimant who would absorb the budget surplus or cover the deficit. Faltings proposed the idea of excluding one agent uniformly at random and making him the residual claimant. Based on this idea, we propose two classes of public good mechanisms and derive optimal ones within each class: Faltings' mechanism is optimal in one of the classes. We then move on to general mechanism design settings, where we prove guarantees on the social welfare achieved by Faltings' mechanism. Finally, we analyze a modification of the mechanism where budget balance is achieved without designating any agent as the residual claimant.

Item Type: Article
Subjects: Topics > Mechanism Design
Work Areas > Incentive Engineering
Divisions: University of Southampton
Depositing User: Angela Westley
Date Deposited: 14 Nov 2011 10:27
Last Modified: 22 Mar 2012 09:38
URI: http://www.orchid.ac.uk/eprints/id/eprint/15

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