In mechanism design it is typical to impose incentive compatibility and then derive an optimal mechanism subject to this constraint. By replacing the incentive compatibility requirement with the goal of minimizing expected ex-post regret, we are able to adapt techniques of statistical machine learning to the design of payment rules. This computational approach to mechanism design is applicable ...

While voting schemes provide an effective means for aggregating preferences, methods for the effective elicitation of voter preferences have received little attention. We address this problem by first considering approximate winner determination when incomplete voter preferences are provided. Exploiting natural scoring metrics, we use max regret to measure the quality or robustness of proposed ...

Judgment aggregation theory studies how to amalgamate individual opinions on a set of logically related issues into a set of collective opinions. Aggregation rules proposed in the literature are sparse. All proposed rules consider only two-valued judgments, thus imposing the strong requirement that an agent cannot abstain from giving judgments on any of the issues. All proposed rules are also i...

In this paper we extend the notion of multi-unit combinatorial reverse auction by adding a new dimension to the goods at auction. In such a new type of combinatorial auction a buyer can express substitutability relationships among goods: some goods can be substituted with others at a substitution cost. Substitutability relationships allow a buyer to introduce his uncertainty as to whether it is...

Multi-robot task allocation research has focused on sequential single-item auctions and various extensions as quick methods for allocating tasks to robots with small overall team costs. In this paper we outline the benefits of grouping tasks with positive synergies together and auctioning clusters of tasks rather than individual tasks. We show that with task-clustering the winner determination ...

The Borda voting rule is a positional scoring rule where, for m candidates, for every vote the first candidate receives m− 1 points, the second m− 2 points and so on. A Borda winner is a candidate with highest total score. It has been a prominent open problem to determine the computational complexity of UNWEIGHTED COALITIONAL MANIPULATION UNDER BORDA: Can one add a certain number of additional ...

Given a system of self-interested agents, each with private information about their preferences, and a set of outcomes, the problem of mechanism design is to select an outcome with desirable properties despite the ability of agents to misreport their preferences. Computational mechanism design (CMD) also insists on computational efficiency, which is a significant concern in domains such as comb...

We extend the IP models proposed by Nisan and Andersson for winner determination in combinatorial auctions, to the problem of evaluating bids for coordinated task sets. This requires relaxing the free disposal assumption, and encoding temporal constraints in the model. We present a basic model, along with an improved model that dramatically reduces the number of rows by preprocessing the tempor...

In a standard path auction, all of the edges in a graph are sold as separate entities, each edge having a single cost. We consider a generalisation in which a graph is partitioned and each subset of edges has a unique owner. We show that if the owner is allowed to apply a non-additive pricing structure then the winner determination problem becomes NP-hard (in contrast with the quadratic time al...

The procurement of transportation services via large-scale combinatorial auctions involves a couple of complex decisions whose outcome highly influences the performance of the tender process. This paper examines the shipper’s task of selecting a subset of the submitted bids which efficiently trades off total procurement cost against expected carrier performance. To solve this bi-objective winne...