On Truthful Item-Acquiring Mechanisms for Reward Maximization

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Shan, Liang, Zhang, Shuo, Zhang, Jie, Wang, Zihe
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Shan, Liang
Zhang, Shuo
Zhang, Jie
Wang, Zihe
author_facet Shan, Liang
Zhang, Shuo
Zhang, Jie
Wang, Zihe
contents In this research, we study the problem that a collector acquires items from the owner based on the item qualities the owner declares and an independent appraiser's assessments. The owner is interested in maximizing the probability that the collector acquires the items and is the only one who knows the items' factual quality. The appraiser performs her duties with impartiality, but her assessment may be subject to random noises, so it may not accurately reflect the factual quality of the items. The main challenge lies in devising mechanisms that prompt the owner to reveal accurate information, thereby optimizing the collector's expected reward. We consider the menu size of mechanisms as a measure of their practicability and study its impact on the attainable expected reward. For the single-item setting, we design optimal mechanisms with a monotone increasing menu size. Although the reward gap between the simplest and optimal mechanisms is bounded, we show that simple mechanisms with a small menu size cannot ensure any positive fraction of the optimal reward of mechanisms with a larger menu size. For the multi-item setting, we show that an ordinal mechanism that only takes the owner's ordering of the items as input is not incentive-compatible. We then propose a set of Union mechanisms that combine single-item mechanisms. Moreover, we run experiments to examine these mechanisms' robustness against the independent appraiser's assessment accuracy and the items' acquiring rate.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_14540
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On Truthful Item-Acquiring Mechanisms for Reward Maximization
Shan, Liang
Zhang, Shuo
Zhang, Jie
Wang, Zihe
Computer Science and Game Theory
In this research, we study the problem that a collector acquires items from the owner based on the item qualities the owner declares and an independent appraiser's assessments. The owner is interested in maximizing the probability that the collector acquires the items and is the only one who knows the items' factual quality. The appraiser performs her duties with impartiality, but her assessment may be subject to random noises, so it may not accurately reflect the factual quality of the items. The main challenge lies in devising mechanisms that prompt the owner to reveal accurate information, thereby optimizing the collector's expected reward. We consider the menu size of mechanisms as a measure of their practicability and study its impact on the attainable expected reward. For the single-item setting, we design optimal mechanisms with a monotone increasing menu size. Although the reward gap between the simplest and optimal mechanisms is bounded, we show that simple mechanisms with a small menu size cannot ensure any positive fraction of the optimal reward of mechanisms with a larger menu size. For the multi-item setting, we show that an ordinal mechanism that only takes the owner's ordering of the items as input is not incentive-compatible. We then propose a set of Union mechanisms that combine single-item mechanisms. Moreover, we run experiments to examine these mechanisms' robustness against the independent appraiser's assessment accuracy and the items' acquiring rate.
title On Truthful Item-Acquiring Mechanisms for Reward Maximization
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14540