The Power of Two-sided Recruitment in Two-sided Markets

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cai, Yang, Liaw, Christopher, Mehta, Aranyak, Zhao, Mingfei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914732575817728
author Cai, Yang
Liaw, Christopher
Mehta, Aranyak
Zhao, Mingfei
author_facet Cai, Yang
Liaw, Christopher
Mehta, Aranyak
Zhao, Mingfei
contents We consider the problem of maximizing the gains from trade (GFT) in two-sided markets. The seminal impossibility result by Myerson and Satterthwaite shows that even for bilateral trade, there is no individually rational (IR), Bayesian incentive compatible (BIC) and budget balanced (BB) mechanism that can achieve the full GFT. Moreover, the optimal BIC, IR and BB mechanism that maximizes the GFT is known to be complex and heavily depends on the prior. In this paper, we pursue a Bulow-Klemperer-style question, i.e., does augmentation allow for prior-independent mechanisms to compete against the optimal mechanism? Our first main result shows that in the double auction setting with $m$ i.i.d. buyers and $n$ i.i.d. sellers, by augmenting $O(1)$ buyers and sellers to the market, the GFT of a simple, dominant strategy incentive compatible (DSIC), and prior-independent mechanism in the augmented market is at least the optimal in the original market, when the buyers' distribution first-order stochastically dominates the sellers' distribution. Next, we go beyond the i.i.d. setting and study the power of two-sided recruitment in more general markets. Our second main result is that for any $ε> 0$ and any set of $O(1/ε)$ buyers and sellers where the buyers' value exceeds the sellers' value with constant probability, if we add these additional agents into any market with arbitrary correlations, the Trade Reduction mechanism obtains a $(1-ε)$-approximation of the GFT of the augmented market. Importantly, the newly recruited agents are agnostic to the original market.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_03844
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Power of Two-sided Recruitment in Two-sided Markets
Cai, Yang
Liaw, Christopher
Mehta, Aranyak
Zhao, Mingfei
Computer Science and Game Theory
We consider the problem of maximizing the gains from trade (GFT) in two-sided markets. The seminal impossibility result by Myerson and Satterthwaite shows that even for bilateral trade, there is no individually rational (IR), Bayesian incentive compatible (BIC) and budget balanced (BB) mechanism that can achieve the full GFT. Moreover, the optimal BIC, IR and BB mechanism that maximizes the GFT is known to be complex and heavily depends on the prior. In this paper, we pursue a Bulow-Klemperer-style question, i.e., does augmentation allow for prior-independent mechanisms to compete against the optimal mechanism? Our first main result shows that in the double auction setting with $m$ i.i.d. buyers and $n$ i.i.d. sellers, by augmenting $O(1)$ buyers and sellers to the market, the GFT of a simple, dominant strategy incentive compatible (DSIC), and prior-independent mechanism in the augmented market is at least the optimal in the original market, when the buyers' distribution first-order stochastically dominates the sellers' distribution. Next, we go beyond the i.i.d. setting and study the power of two-sided recruitment in more general markets. Our second main result is that for any $ε> 0$ and any set of $O(1/ε)$ buyers and sellers where the buyers' value exceeds the sellers' value with constant probability, if we add these additional agents into any market with arbitrary correlations, the Trade Reduction mechanism obtains a $(1-ε)$-approximation of the GFT of the augmented market. Importantly, the newly recruited agents are agnostic to the original market.
title The Power of Two-sided Recruitment in Two-sided Markets
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03844