Mechanism design is a high-impact branch of economics and computer science that studies the implementation of socially desirable outcomes among strategic self-interested agents. Major real-world use cases include combinatorial auctions ( e.g., strategic sourcing, radio spectrum auctions),

We study the design of mechanisms under asymmetric awareness and information. While the mechanism designer cannot necessarily commit to a particular social choice function in the face of unawareness, she can at least commit to properties of social choice functions such as efficiency given ex post awareness. Assuming quasi-linear utilities and private values, we show that we can implement in conditional dominant strategies a social choice function that is utilitarian ex post efficient under pooled awareness without the need of the social planner being fully aware ex ante. To this end, we develop novel dynamic versions of Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanisms in which true types are revealed and subsequently elaborated at endogenous higher awareness levels. We explore how asymmetric awareness affects budget balance and participation constraints. We show that ex ante unforeseen contingencies are no excuse for deficits. Finally, we propose a dynamic elaboration reverse second price auction for efficient procurement of complex incompletely specified projects with budget balance and participation constraints.

We consider the problem of online dynamic mechanism design for sequential auctions in unknown environments, where the underlying market and, thus, the bidders' values vary over time as interactions between the seller and the bidders progress. We model the sequential auctions as an infinite-horizon average-reward Markov decision process (MDP). In each round, the seller determines an allocation and sets a payment for each bidder, while each bidder receives a private reward and submits a sealed bid to the seller. The state, which represents the underlying market, evolves according to an unknown transition kernel and the seller's allocation policy without episodic resets. We first extend the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism to sequential auctions, thereby obtaining a dynamic counterpart that preserves the desired properties: efficiency, truthfulness, and individual rationality. We then focus on the online setting and develop a reinforcement learning algorithm for the seller to learn the underlying MDP and implement a mechanism that closely resembles the dynamic VCG mechanism. We show that the learned mechanism approximately satisfies efficiency, truthfulness, and individual rationality and achieves guaranteed performance in terms of various notions of regret.

Mechanism design is a high-impact branch of economics and computer science that studies the implementation of socially desirable outcomes among strategic self-interested agents. Major real-world use cases include combinatorial auctions ( e.g., strategic sourcing, radio spectrum auctions),

Mechanism design is a high-impact branch of economics and computer science that studies the implementation of socially desirable outcomes among strategic self-interested agents. Major real-world use cases include combinatorial auctions ( e.g., strategic sourcing, radio spectrum auctions),

The AI safety literature is full of examples of powerful AI agents that, in blindly pursuing a specific and usually narrow objective, ends up with unacceptable and even catastrophic collateral damage to others. In this paper, we consider the problem of social harms that can result from actions taken by learning and utility-maximising agents in a multi-agent environment. The problem of measuring social harms or impacts in such multi-agent settings, especially when the agents are artificial generally intelligent (AGI) agents, was listed as an open problem in Everitt et al, 2018. We attempt a partial answer to that open problem in the form of market-based mechanisms to quantify and control the cost of such social harms. The proposed setup captures many well-studied special cases and is more general than existing formulations of multi-agent reinforcement learning with mechanism design in two ways: (i) the underlying environment is a history-based general reinforcement learning environment like in AIXI; (ii) the reinforcement-learning agents participating in the environment can have different learning strategies and planning horizons. To demonstrate the practicality of the proposed setup, we survey some key classes of learning algorithms and present a few applications, including a discussion of the Paperclips problem and pollution control with a cap-and-trade system.

In social decision-making among strategic agents, a universal focus lies on the balance between social and individual interests. Socially efficient mechanisms are thus desirably designed to not only maximize the social welfare but also incentivize the agents for their own profit. Under a generalized model that includes applications such as double auctions and trading networks, this study establishes a socially efficient (SE), dominant-strategy incentive compatible (DSIC), and individually rational (IR) mechanism with the minimum total budget expensed to the agents. The present method exploits discrete and known type domains to reduce a set of constraints into the shortest path problem in a weighted graph. In addition to theoretical derivation, we substantiate the optimality of the proposed mechanism through numerical experiments, where it certifies strictly lower budget than Vickery-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanisms for a wide class of instances.