Mechanism Design with Spiteful Agents
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866909937031970816 |
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| author | Aradhye, Aditya Lagziel, David Solan, Eilon |
| author_facet | Aradhye, Aditya Lagziel, David Solan, Eilon |
| contents | We study a mechanism-design problem in which spiteful agents strive to not only maximize their rewards but also, contingent upon their own payoff levels, seek to lower the opponents' rewards. We characterize all individually rational (IR) and incentive-compatible (IC) mechanisms that are immune to such spiteful behavior, showing that they take the form of threshold mechanisms with an ordering of the agents. Building on this characterization, we prove two impossibility results: under either anonymity or efficiency, any such IR and IC mechanism collapses to the null mechanism, which never allocates the item to any agent. Leveraging these findings, we partially extend our analysis to a multi-item setup. These results illuminate the challenges of auctioning items in the natural presence of other-regarding preferences. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_01021 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Mechanism Design with Spiteful Agents Aradhye, Aditya Lagziel, David Solan, Eilon Computer Science and Game Theory Optimization and Control 91A40 We study a mechanism-design problem in which spiteful agents strive to not only maximize their rewards but also, contingent upon their own payoff levels, seek to lower the opponents' rewards. We characterize all individually rational (IR) and incentive-compatible (IC) mechanisms that are immune to such spiteful behavior, showing that they take the form of threshold mechanisms with an ordering of the agents. Building on this characterization, we prove two impossibility results: under either anonymity or efficiency, any such IR and IC mechanism collapses to the null mechanism, which never allocates the item to any agent. Leveraging these findings, we partially extend our analysis to a multi-item setup. These results illuminate the challenges of auctioning items in the natural presence of other-regarding preferences. |
| title | Mechanism Design with Spiteful Agents |
| topic | Computer Science and Game Theory Optimization and Control 91A40 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01021 |