Back to original frugality

Time to Go Back to the Original Name

Almost 40 years ago, the first pathogenic human retrovirus was discovered and shown to cause a T-cell leukemia in humans (Poiesz et al., 1980a, 1981). Thus, a new paradigm was established showing that a virus can directly cause cancer in humans. At that time, the only other suspected case was the connection between the Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) and Burkitt’s Lymphoma and later nasopharyngeal car...

Commodity Auctions and Frugality Ratios

We study set-system auctions whereby a single buyer wants to purchase Q items of some commodity. There are multiple sellers, each of whom has some known number of items, and a private cost for supplying those items. Thus a “feasible set” of sellers (a set that is able to comprise the winning bidders) is any set of sellers whose total quantity sums to at least Q. We show that, even in a limited ...

Frugality in set-system auctions

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Frugality in Path Au tions

Using Nash Implementation to Achieve Better Frugality Ratios

Most of the recent works on algorithmic mechanism design exploit the solution concept of dominant strategy equilibria. Such work designs a proper payment scheme so that selfish agents maximize their utility by truthfully revealing their types. It has been pointed out that these truthful mechanisms, the famous among them being the VCG mechanisms, often incur high payments and fruglity ratios. In...