Truthful Secretaries with Budgets

Alon Eden; Michal Feldman; Adi Vardi

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arXiv · 1504.03625

Truthful Secretaries with Budgets

Alon Eden·Michal Feldman·Adi Vardi

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Abstract

We study online auction settings in which agents arrive and depart dynamically in a random (secretary) order, and each agent's private type consists of the agent's arrival and departure times, value and budget. We consider multi-unit auctions with additive agents for the allocation of both divisible and indivisible items. For both settings, we devise truthful mechanisms that give a constant approximation with respect to the auctioneer's revenue, under a large market assumption. For divisible items, we devise in addition a truthful mechanism that gives a constant approximation with respect to the liquid welfare --- a natural efficiency measure for budgeted settings introduced by Dobzinski and Paes Leme [ICALP'14]. Our techniques provide high-level principles for transforming offline truthful mechanisms into online ones, with or without budget constraints. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses the non-trivial challenge of combining online settings with budgeted agents.

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BibTeX RIS

Alon Eden, Michal Feldman, Adi Vardi. 2015-04-14. Truthful Secretaries with Budgets. https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.03625

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