Efficient allocation of free stuff

Yossi Azar, Allan Borodin, Michal Feldman, Amos Fiat, Kineret Segal

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

We study online matching settings with selfish agents when everything is free Inconsiderate agents break ties arbitrarily amongst equal maximal value available choices, even if the maximal value is equal to zero Even for the simplest case of zero/one valuations, where agents arrive online in an arbitrary order, and agents are restricted to taking at most one item, the resulting social welfare may be negligible for a deterministic algorithm This may be surprising when contrasted with the 1/2 approximation of the greedy algorithm, analogous to this setting, except that agents are considerate (i.e., they don't take zero-valued items) We overcome this challenge by introducing a new class of algorithms, which we refer to as prioritization algorithms We show that upgrading a random subset of the agents to "business class- A lready improves the approximation to a constant For more general valuations, we achieve a constant approximation using log n prior-it)' classes, when the valuations are known in advance We extend these results to settings where agents have additive valuations and are restricted to taking up to some q 1 items Our results are tight up to a constant.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2019
PublisherInternational Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS)
Pages918-925
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781510892002
StatePublished - 2019
Event18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2019 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: 13 May 201917 May 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS
Volume2
ISSN (Print)1548-8403
ISSN (Electronic)1558-2914

Conference

Conference18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2019
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityMontreal
Period13/05/1917/05/19

Keywords

  • Online matching
  • Selfish agents
  • Welfare approximation

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