This paper analyzes sequential auctions for budget constrained bidders, for multiple heterogeneous common value objects. In most auctions, bidders not only have valuations for objects but also have budget constraints (i.e., constraints on how much they can actually spend in an auction). Given these constraints, the bidders’ problem is to determine how much to bid in each auction. To this end, t...

A natural way to deal with multiple, partially conflicting objectives is turning all the objectives but one into budget constraints. Some classical optimization problems, such as spanning tree and forest, shortest path, (perfect) matching, independent set (basis) in a matroid or in the intersection of two matroids, become NP-hard even with one budget constraint. Still, for most of these problem...

Provision of Social Goods and Soft Budget Constraints* by Lars-Hendrik Röller and Zhentang Zhang Firms in socialist and transitional economies are often obliged to provide a social good in addition to a private good, which makes it difficult for a government to commit not to bail out the firm once it is in financial trouble. This creates a soft budget constraint syndrome which causes the firm t...

The paper introduces a notion of a budgetconstrained multiagent transition system that associates two financial parameters with each transition: a pre-transition minimal budget requirement and a post-transition profit. The paper proposes a new modal language for reasoning about such a system. The language uses a modality labeled by agent as well as by budget and profit constraints. The main tec...

The problem of maximizing the spread of influence with a limited budget is central to social networks research. Most problems addressed in existing literature spend the entire budget towards triggering diffusion at seed nodes. In this paper, we investigate the effect of splitting the budget across two sequential phases; each phase corresponds to a different way of spreading influence. In phase ...