Prophet Upper Bounds for Online Matching and Auctions

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Soto, José, Verdugo, Victor
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Soto, José
Verdugo, Victor
author_facet Soto, José
Verdugo, Victor
contents In the online 2-bounded auction problem, we have a collection of items represented as nodes in a graph and bundles of size two represented by edges. Agents are presented sequentially, each with a random weight function over the bundles. The goal of the decision-maker is to find an allocation of bundles to agents of maximum weight so that every item is assigned at most once, i.e., the solution is a matching in the graph. When the agents are single-minded (i.e., put all the weight in a single bundle), we recover the maximum weight prophet matching problem under edge arrivals (a.k.a. prophet matching). In this work, we provide new and improved upper bounds on the competitiveness achievable by an algorithm for the general online 2-bounded auction and the (single-minded) prophet matching problems. For adversarial arrival order of the agents, we show that no algorithm for the online 2-bounded auction problem achieves a competitiveness larger than $4/11$, while no algorithm for prophet matching achieves a competitiveness larger than $\approx 0.4189$. Using a continuous-time analysis, we also improve the known bounds for online 2-bounded auctions for random order arrivals to $\approx 0.5968$ in the general case, a bound of $\approx 0.6867$ in the IID model, and $\approx 0.6714$ in prophet-secretary model.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_12756
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Prophet Upper Bounds for Online Matching and Auctions
Soto, José
Verdugo, Victor
Computer Science and Game Theory
Data Structures and Algorithms
In the online 2-bounded auction problem, we have a collection of items represented as nodes in a graph and bundles of size two represented by edges. Agents are presented sequentially, each with a random weight function over the bundles. The goal of the decision-maker is to find an allocation of bundles to agents of maximum weight so that every item is assigned at most once, i.e., the solution is a matching in the graph. When the agents are single-minded (i.e., put all the weight in a single bundle), we recover the maximum weight prophet matching problem under edge arrivals (a.k.a. prophet matching). In this work, we provide new and improved upper bounds on the competitiveness achievable by an algorithm for the general online 2-bounded auction and the (single-minded) prophet matching problems. For adversarial arrival order of the agents, we show that no algorithm for the online 2-bounded auction problem achieves a competitiveness larger than $4/11$, while no algorithm for prophet matching achieves a competitiveness larger than $\approx 0.4189$. Using a continuous-time analysis, we also improve the known bounds for online 2-bounded auctions for random order arrivals to $\approx 0.5968$ in the general case, a bound of $\approx 0.6867$ in the IID model, and $\approx 0.6714$ in prophet-secretary model.
title Prophet Upper Bounds for Online Matching and Auctions
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Data Structures and Algorithms
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.12756