Mechanism Design with Outliers and Predictions

Abstract

We initiate the study of mechanism design with outliers, where the designer can discard $z$ agents from the social cost objective. This setting is particularly relevant when some agents exhibit extreme or atypical preferences. As a natural case study, we consider facility location on the line: $n$ strategic agents report their preferred locations, and a mechanism places a facility to minimize a social cost function. In our setting, the $z$ agents farthest from the chosen facility are excluded from the social cost. While it may seem intuitive that discarding outliers improves efficiency, our results reveal that the opposite can hold. We derive tight bounds for deterministic strategyproof mechanisms under the two most-studied objectives: utilitarian and egalitarian social cost. Our results offer a comprehensive view of the impact of outliers. We first show that when $z \ge n/2$, no strategyproof mechanism can achieve a bounded approximation for either objective. For egalitarian cost, selecting the $(z + 1)$-th order statistic is strategyproof and 2-approximate. In fact, we show that this is best possible by providing a matching lower bound. Notably, this lower bound of 2 persists even when the mechanism has access to a prediction of the optimal location, in stark contrast to the setting without outliers. For utilitarian cost, we show that strategyproof mechanisms cannot effectively exploit outliers, leading to the counterintuitive outcome that approximation guarantees worsen as the number of outliers increases. However, in this case, access to a prediction allows us to design a strategyproof mechanism achieving the best possible trade-off between consistency and robustness. Finally, we also establish lower bounds for randomized mechanisms that are truthful in expectation.