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International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming

ICALP 2012: Automata, Languages, and Programming pp 636–647Cite as

Online Mechanism Design (Randomized Rounding on the Fly)

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7392))

Abstract

We study incentive compatible mechanisms for combinatorial auctions (CAs) in an online model with sequentially arriving bidders, where the arrivals’ order is either random or adversarial. The bidders’ valuations are given by demand oracles. Previously known online mechanisms for CAs assume that each item is available at a certain multiplicity b > 1. Typically, one assumes b = Ω(logm), where m is the number of different items.

We present the first online mechanisms guaranteeing competitiveness for any multiplicity b ≥ 1. We introduce an online variant of oblivious randomized rounding enabling us to prove competitive ratios that are close to or even beat the best known offline approximation factors for various CAs settings. Our mechanisms are universally truthful, and they significantly improve on the previously known mechanisms.

This work has been supported by EPSRC grants EP/F069502/1 and EP/G069239/1.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, UK

    Piotr Krysta

  2. Department of Computer Science, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

    Berthold Vöcking

Authors
  1. Piotr Krysta
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  2. Berthold Vöcking
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications, University of Warwick, Warwick, UK

    Artur Czumaj

  2. Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Kurt Mehlhorn

  3. Computer Laboratory,, University of Cambridge, UK

    Andrew Pitts

  4. ETH Zurich, Switzerland

    Roger Wattenhofer

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Krysta, P., Vöcking, B. (2012). Online Mechanism Design (Randomized Rounding on the Fly). In: Czumaj, A., Mehlhorn, K., Pitts, A., Wattenhofer, R. (eds) Automata, Languages, and Programming. ICALP 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7392. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31585-5_56

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31585-5_56

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31584-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31585-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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