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SUMMARY:Welfare and Fairness in Dominant-Strategy Mechanisms - Victor Naro
 ditskiy (University of Southampton)
DTSTART:20140204T140000Z
DTEND:20140204T150000Z
UID:TALK49429@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Felix Fischer
DESCRIPTION:I study allocation of resources among participants with privat
 e valuations. Payments are commonly used to make truthful reporting a domi
 nant strategy. I focus on allocation scenarios without an auctioneer who i
 s benefiting from the collected payments. I ask the question of finding th
 e best mechanism according to a utilitarian or egalitarian objective. For 
 the class of efficient mechanisms\, the question boils down to choosing th
 e best payment function\, which pins down a mechanism from the Groves clas
 s. I obtain general characterisation results along with an approach for ch
 oosing the best Groves mechanism. The characterisation links optimality of
  the mechanism's payment function to a geometric condition involving trian
 gulations of hypercubes. I then derive optimal payment functions for sever
 al fundamental resource allocation scenarios. In the context of allocating
  identical items\, I design a non-efficient mechanism that achieves much b
 etter welfare guarantees than the best efficient mechanism. This illustrat
 es an unintuitive result that "destroying" some of the resources may incre
 ase welfare.
LOCATION:MR15\, Centre for Mathematical Sciences\, Wilberforce Road\, Camb
 ridge
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