Algorithms as mechanisms: the price of anarchy of relax and round

Dütting, Paul, Kesselheim, Thomas and Tardos, Eva (2020) Algorithms as mechanisms: the price of anarchy of relax and round. Mathematics of Operations Research, 46 (1). ISSN 0364-765X

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Abstract

Many algorithms that are originally designed without explicitly considering incentive properties are later combined with simple pricing rules and used as mechanisms. A key question is therefore to understand which algorithms, or, more generally, which algorithm design principles, when combined with simple payment rules such as pay your bid, yield mechanisms with a small price of anarchy. Our main result concerns mechanisms that are based on the relax-and-round paradigm. It shows that oblivious rounding schemes approximately preserve price of anarchy guarantees provable via smoothness. By virtue of our smoothness proofs, our price of anarchy bounds extend to Bayes–Nash equilibria and learning outcomes. In fact, they even apply out of equilibrium, requiring only that agents have no regret for deviations to half their value. We demonstrate the broad applicability of our main result by instantiating it for a wide range of optimization problems ranging from sparse packing integer programs, over single-source unsplittable flow problems and combinatorial auctions with fractionally subadditive valuations, to a maximization variant of the traveling salesman problem.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://pubsonline.informs.org/journal/moor
Additional Information:	© 2020 INFORMS
Divisions:	Mathematics
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics
Date Deposited:	21 Feb 2020 16:27
Last Modified:	12 Dec 2024 02:04
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/103536

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