{"title":"Editorial from the New Co-Editors-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation","authors":"Paul W. Goldberg, Utku Ünver","doi":"10.1145/3631669","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3631669","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42216,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation","volume":" 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138962488","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Andrés Abeliuk, Khaled M. Elbassioni, Talal Rahwan, Manuel Cebrián, Iyad Rahwan
Algorithmic matching is a pervasive mechanism in our social lives and is becoming a major medium through which people find romantic partners and potential spouses. However, romantic matching markets pose a principal-agent problem with the potential for moral hazard. The agent’s (or system’s) interest is to maximize the use of the matching website, while the principal’s (or user’s) interest is to find the best possible match. This creates a conflict of interest: the optimal matching of users may not be aligned with the platform’s goal of maximizing engagement, as it could lead to long-term relationships and fewer users using the site over time. Here, we borrow the notion of price-of-anarchy from game theory to quantify the decrease in social efficiency of online algorithmic matching sites where engagement is in tension with user utility. We derive theoretical bounds on the price-of-anarchy and show that it can be bounded by a constant that does not depend on the number of users in the system. This suggests that as online matching sites grow, their potential benefits scale up without sacrificing social efficiency. Further, we conducted experiments with human subjects in a matching market and compared the social welfare achieved by an optimal matching service against a self-interested matching algorithm. We show that introducing competition among matching sites aligns the self-interested behavior of platform designers with their users and increases social efficiency.
{"title":"Price of Anarchy in Algorithmic Matching of Romantic Partners","authors":"Andrés Abeliuk, Khaled M. Elbassioni, Talal Rahwan, Manuel Cebrián, Iyad Rahwan","doi":"10.1145/3627985","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3627985","url":null,"abstract":"Algorithmic matching is a pervasive mechanism in our social lives and is becoming a major medium through which people find romantic partners and potential spouses. However, romantic matching markets pose a principal-agent problem with the potential for moral hazard. The agent’s (or system’s) interest is to maximize the use of the matching website, while the principal’s (or user’s) interest is to find the best possible match. This creates a conflict of interest: the optimal matching of users may not be aligned with the platform’s goal of maximizing engagement, as it could lead to long-term relationships and fewer users using the site over time. Here, we borrow the notion of price-of-anarchy from game theory to quantify the decrease in social efficiency of online algorithmic matching sites where engagement is in tension with user utility. We derive theoretical bounds on the price-of-anarchy and show that it can be bounded by a constant that does not depend on the number of users in the system. This suggests that as online matching sites grow, their potential benefits scale up without sacrificing social efficiency. Further, we conducted experiments with human subjects in a matching market and compared the social welfare achieved by an optimal matching service against a self-interested matching algorithm. We show that introducing competition among matching sites aligns the self-interested behavior of platform designers with their users and increases social efficiency.","PeriodicalId":42216,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation","volume":"227 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135774995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Much of the work on multi-agent contests is focused on determining the equilibrium behavior of contestants. This capability is essential for the principal for choosing the optimal parameters for the contest (e.g. prize amount). As it turns out, many contests exhibit not one, but many possible equilibria, hence precluding contest design optimization and contestants’ behavior prediction. In this paper we examine a variation of the classic contest that alleviates this problem by having contestants make the decisions sequentially rather than in parallel. We study this model in the setting of a binary contest , wherein contestants only choose whether or not to participate, while their performance level is exogenously set. We show that by switching to the sequential mechanism not only does there emerge a unique equilibrium behavior, but also that the principal can design this behavior to be as good, and, at times, better, than any pure-strategy equilibrium of the parallel setting (assuming the principal’s profit is either the maximum performance or the sum of performances). We also show that in the sequential setting enables the optimal prize, which is inherently a continuous parameter, can be effectively computed and reduced to a set of discrete values to be evaluated. The theoretical analysis is complemented by comprehensive experiments with people over Amazon Mechanical Turk. Here, we find that the modified mechanism offers great benefit for the principal in terms of an increased over-participation in the contest (compared to theoretical expectations). The effect on the principal average profit, however, depends on its goal in the contest – when benefiting from the maximum performance the modified mechanism results in increased average profit, while when benefiting from the sum of performances, it is preferred to stay with the original (parallel) contest.
{"title":"Tractable Binary Contests","authors":"Priel Levy, David Sarne, Yonatan Aumann","doi":"10.1145/3630109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3630109","url":null,"abstract":"Much of the work on multi-agent contests is focused on determining the equilibrium behavior of contestants. This capability is essential for the principal for choosing the optimal parameters for the contest (e.g. prize amount). As it turns out, many contests exhibit not one, but many possible equilibria, hence precluding contest design optimization and contestants’ behavior prediction. In this paper we examine a variation of the classic contest that alleviates this problem by having contestants make the decisions sequentially rather than in parallel. We study this model in the setting of a binary contest , wherein contestants only choose whether or not to participate, while their performance level is exogenously set. We show that by switching to the sequential mechanism not only does there emerge a unique equilibrium behavior, but also that the principal can design this behavior to be as good, and, at times, better, than any pure-strategy equilibrium of the parallel setting (assuming the principal’s profit is either the maximum performance or the sum of performances). We also show that in the sequential setting enables the optimal prize, which is inherently a continuous parameter, can be effectively computed and reduced to a set of discrete values to be evaluated. The theoretical analysis is complemented by comprehensive experiments with people over Amazon Mechanical Turk. Here, we find that the modified mechanism offers great benefit for the principal in terms of an increased over-participation in the contest (compared to theoretical expectations). The effect on the principal average profit, however, depends on its goal in the contest – when benefiting from the maximum performance the modified mechanism results in increased average profit, while when benefiting from the sum of performances, it is preferred to stay with the original (parallel) contest.","PeriodicalId":42216,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134907709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We consider clustering games in which the players are embedded into a network and want to coordinate (or anti-coordinate) their strategy with their neighbors. The goal of a player is to choose a strategy that maximizes her utility given the strategies of her neighbors. Recent studies show that even very basic variants of these games exhibit a large Price of Anarchy: A large inefficiency between the total utility generated in centralized outcomes and equilibrium outcomes in which players selfishly maximize their utility. Our main goal is to understand how structural properties of the network topology impact the inefficiency of these games. We derive topological bounds on the Price of Anarchy for different classes of clustering games. These topological bounds provide a more informative assessment of the inefficiency of these games than the corresponding worst-case Price of Anarchy bounds. More specifically, depending on the type of clustering game, our bounds reveal that the Price of Anarchy depends on the maximum subgraph density or the maximum degree of the graph. Among others, these bounds enable us to derive bounds on the Price of Anarchy for clustering games on Erdős-Rényi random graphs. Depending on the graph density, these bounds stand in stark contrast to the known worst-case Price of Anarchy bounds. Additionally, we also characterize the set of distribution rules that guarantee the existence of a pure Nash equilibrium or the convergence of best-response dynamics. These results are of a similar spirit as the work of Gopalakrishnan et al. [19] and complement work of Anshelevich and Sekar [4].
我们考虑聚类博弈，其中参与者嵌入到网络中，并希望与邻居协调(或反协调)他们的策略。玩家的目标是根据邻居的策略选择一种能最大化自己效用的策略。最近的研究表明，即使是这些游戏的基本变体也表现出了巨大的无政府价格(Price of Anarchy):集中结果所产生的总效用与玩家自私地最大化其效用的均衡结果之间存在巨大的效率低下。我们的主要目标是了解网络拓扑的结构属性如何影响这些游戏的低效率。我们推导了不同类别聚类对策的无序价格的拓扑界。这些拓扑边界比相应的最坏情况下的无政府状态价格边界提供了对这些博弈的低效率的更有价值的评估。更具体地说，根据聚类博弈的类型，我们的边界揭示了无政府状态的代价取决于最大子图密度或图的最大程度。除此之外，这些界限使我们能够推导出Erdős-Rényi随机图上聚类游戏的混乱价格的界限。根据图密度的不同，这些边界与已知的最坏情况下的无政府状态边界形成鲜明对比。此外，我们还描述了保证纯纳什均衡存在或最佳响应动力学收敛的一组分布规则。这些结果与Gopalakrishnan等人的工作具有相似的精神，并补充了Anshelevich和Sekar等人的工作。
{"title":"Topological Bounds on the Price of Anarchy of Clustering Games on Networks","authors":"Pieter Kleer, Guido Schäfer","doi":"10.1145/3625689","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3625689","url":null,"abstract":"We consider clustering games in which the players are embedded into a network and want to coordinate (or anti-coordinate) their strategy with their neighbors. The goal of a player is to choose a strategy that maximizes her utility given the strategies of her neighbors. Recent studies show that even very basic variants of these games exhibit a large Price of Anarchy: A large inefficiency between the total utility generated in centralized outcomes and equilibrium outcomes in which players selfishly maximize their utility. Our main goal is to understand how structural properties of the network topology impact the inefficiency of these games. We derive topological bounds on the Price of Anarchy for different classes of clustering games. These topological bounds provide a more informative assessment of the inefficiency of these games than the corresponding worst-case Price of Anarchy bounds. More specifically, depending on the type of clustering game, our bounds reveal that the Price of Anarchy depends on the maximum subgraph density or the maximum degree of the graph. Among others, these bounds enable us to derive bounds on the Price of Anarchy for clustering games on Erdős-Rényi random graphs. Depending on the graph density, these bounds stand in stark contrast to the known worst-case Price of Anarchy bounds. Additionally, we also characterize the set of distribution rules that guarantee the existence of a pure Nash equilibrium or the convergence of best-response dynamics. These results are of a similar spirit as the work of Gopalakrishnan et al. [19] and complement work of Anshelevich and Sekar [4].","PeriodicalId":42216,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135094259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Shared/buy-in computing systems offer users with the option to select between buy-in and shared services. In such systems, idle buy-in resources are made available to other users for sharing. With strategic users, resource purchase and allocation in such systems can be cast as a non-cooperative game, whose corresponding Nash equilibrium does not necessarily result in the optimal social cost. In this study, we first derive the optimal social cost of the game in closed form, by casting it as a convex optimization problem and establishing related properties. Next, we derive a closed-form expression for the social cost at the Nash equilibrium, and show that it can be computed in linear time. We further show that the strategy profiles of users at the optimum and the Nash equilibrium are directly proportional. We measure the inefficiency of the Nash equilibrium through the price of anarchy, and show that it can be quite large in certain cases, e.g., when the operating expense ratio is low or when the distribution of user workloads is relatively homogeneous. To improve the efficiency of the system, we propose and analyze two subsidy policies, which are shown to converge using best-response dynamics.
{"title":"Social Cost Analysis of Shared/Buy-in Computing Systems","authors":"Zhenpeng Shi, David Starobinski, Ariel Orda","doi":"10.1145/3624355","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3624355","url":null,"abstract":"Shared/buy-in computing systems offer users with the option to select between buy-in and shared services. In such systems, idle buy-in resources are made available to other users for sharing. With strategic users, resource purchase and allocation in such systems can be cast as a non-cooperative game, whose corresponding Nash equilibrium does not necessarily result in the optimal social cost. In this study, we first derive the optimal social cost of the game in closed form, by casting it as a convex optimization problem and establishing related properties. Next, we derive a closed-form expression for the social cost at the Nash equilibrium, and show that it can be computed in linear time. We further show that the strategy profiles of users at the optimum and the Nash equilibrium are directly proportional. We measure the inefficiency of the Nash equilibrium through the price of anarchy, and show that it can be quite large in certain cases, e.g., when the operating expense ratio is low or when the distribution of user workloads is relatively homogeneous. To improve the efficiency of the system, we propose and analyze two subsidy policies, which are shown to converge using best-response dynamics.","PeriodicalId":42216,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135925511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Yotam Gafni, Xin Huang, Ron Lavi, Inbal Talgam-Cohen
We consider fair allocation of indivisible items in a model with goods, chores, and copies, as a unified framework for studying: (1) the existence of EFX and other solution concepts for goods with copies; (2) the existence of EFX and other solution concepts for chores. We establish a tight relation between these issues via two conceptual contributions: First, a refinement of envy-based fairness notions that we term envy without commons (denoted EFX WC when applied to EFX). Second, a formal duality theorem relating the existence of a host of (refined) fair allocation concepts for copies to their existence for chores. We demonstrate the usefulness of our duality result by using it to characterize the existence of EFX for chores through the dual environment, as well as to prove EFX existence in the special case of leveled preferences over the chores. We further study the hierarchy among envy-freeness notions without commons and their α -MMS guarantees, showing for example that any EFX WC allocation guarantees at least (frac{4}{11} ) -MMS for goods with copies.
{"title":"Unified Fair Allocation of Goods and Chores via Copies","authors":"Yotam Gafni, Xin Huang, Ron Lavi, Inbal Talgam-Cohen","doi":"10.1145/3618116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3618116","url":null,"abstract":"We consider fair allocation of indivisible items in a model with goods, chores, and copies, as a unified framework for studying: (1) the existence of EFX and other solution concepts for goods with copies; (2) the existence of EFX and other solution concepts for chores. We establish a tight relation between these issues via two conceptual contributions: First, a refinement of envy-based fairness notions that we term envy without commons (denoted EFX WC when applied to EFX). Second, a formal duality theorem relating the existence of a host of (refined) fair allocation concepts for copies to their existence for chores. We demonstrate the usefulness of our duality result by using it to characterize the existence of EFX for chores through the dual environment, as well as to prove EFX existence in the special case of leveled preferences over the chores. We further study the hierarchy among envy-freeness notions without commons and their α -MMS guarantees, showing for example that any EFX WC allocation guarantees at least (frac{4}{11} ) -MMS for goods with copies.","PeriodicalId":42216,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation","volume":"2014 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136010810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We consider the Arrow–Debreu exchange market model under the assumption that the agents’ demands satisfy the weak gross substitutes (WGS) property. We present a simple auction algorithm that obtains an approximate market equilibrium for WGS demands assuming the availability of a price update oracle. We exhibit specific implementations of such an oracle for WGS demands with bounded price elasticities and for Gale demand systems.
{"title":"An Auction Algorithm for Market Equilibrium with Weak Gross Substitute Demands","authors":"Jugal Garg, Edin Husić, László A. Végh","doi":"10.1145/3624558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3624558","url":null,"abstract":"We consider the Arrow–Debreu exchange market model under the assumption that the agents’ demands satisfy the weak gross substitutes (WGS) property. We present a simple auction algorithm that obtains an approximate market equilibrium for WGS demands assuming the availability of a price update oracle. We exhibit specific implementations of such an oracle for WGS demands with bounded price elasticities and for Gale demand systems.","PeriodicalId":42216,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation","volume":"2013 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134913132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In a classical online decision problem, a decision-maker who is trying to maximize her value inspects a sequence of arriving items to learn their values (drawn from known distributions), and decides when to stop the process by taking the current item. The goal is to prove a “prophet inequality”: that she can do approximately as well as a prophet with foreknowledge of all the values. In this work, we investigate this problem when the values are allowed to be correlated. Since non-trivial guarantees are impossible for arbitrary correlations, we consider a natural “linear” correlation structure introduced by Bateni et al. [9] as a generalization of the common-base value model of Chawla et al. [14]. A key challenge is that threshold-based algorithms, which are commonly used for prophet inequalities, no longer guarantee good performance for linear correlations. We relate this roadblock to another “augmentations” challenge that might be of independent interest: many existing prophet inequality algorithms are not robust to slight increases in the values of the arriving items. We leverage this intuition to prove bounds (matching up to constant factors) that decay gracefully with the amount of correlation of the arriving items. We extend these results to the case of selecting multiple items by designing a new (1 + o (1)) approximation ratio algorithm that is robust to augmentations.
{"title":"Prophet Inequalities with Linear Correlations and Augmentations","authors":"Nicole Immorlica, Sahil Singla, Bo Waggoner","doi":"10.1145/3623273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3623273","url":null,"abstract":"In a classical online decision problem, a decision-maker who is trying to maximize her value inspects a sequence of arriving items to learn their values (drawn from known distributions), and decides when to stop the process by taking the current item. The goal is to prove a “prophet inequality”: that she can do approximately as well as a prophet with foreknowledge of all the values. In this work, we investigate this problem when the values are allowed to be correlated. Since non-trivial guarantees are impossible for arbitrary correlations, we consider a natural “linear” correlation structure introduced by Bateni et al. [9] as a generalization of the common-base value model of Chawla et al. [14]. A key challenge is that threshold-based algorithms, which are commonly used for prophet inequalities, no longer guarantee good performance for linear correlations. We relate this roadblock to another “augmentations” challenge that might be of independent interest: many existing prophet inequality algorithms are not robust to slight increases in the values of the arriving items. We leverage this intuition to prove bounds (matching up to constant factors) that decay gracefully with the amount of correlation of the arriving items. We extend these results to the case of selecting multiple items by designing a new (1 + o (1)) approximation ratio algorithm that is robust to augmentations.","PeriodicalId":42216,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136298764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Felix Brandt, Martin Bullinger, Anaëlle Wilczynski
The formal study of coalition formation in multi-agent systems is typically realized in the framework of hedonic games, which originate from economic theory. The main focus of this branch of research has been on the existence and the computational complexity of deciding the existence of coalition structures that satisfy various stability criteria. The actual process of forming coalitions based on individual behavior has received little attention. In this article, we study the convergence of simple dynamics leading to stable partitions in a variety of established classes of hedonic games, including anonymous, dichotomous, fractional, and hedonic diversity games. The dynamics we consider is based on individual stability: an agent will join another coalition if she is better off and no member of the welcoming coalition is worse off. Our results are threefold. First, we identify conditions for the (fast) convergence of our dynamics. To this end, we develop new techniques based on the simultaneous usage of multiple intertwined potential functions and establish a reduction uncovering a close relationship between anonymous hedonic games and hedonic diversity games. Second, we provide elaborate counterexamples determining tight boundaries for the existence of individually stable partitions. Third, we study the computational complexity of problems related to the coalition formation dynamics. In particular, we settle open problems suggested by Bogomolnaia and Jackson, Brandl et al., and Boehmer and Elkind.
{"title":"Reaching Individually Stable Coalition Structures","authors":"Felix Brandt, Martin Bullinger, Anaëlle Wilczynski","doi":"10.1145/3588753","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3588753","url":null,"abstract":"The formal study of coalition formation in multi-agent systems is typically realized in the framework of hedonic games, which originate from economic theory. The main focus of this branch of research has been on the existence and the computational complexity of deciding the existence of coalition structures that satisfy various stability criteria. The actual process of forming coalitions based on individual behavior has received little attention. In this article, we study the convergence of simple dynamics leading to stable partitions in a variety of established classes of hedonic games, including anonymous, dichotomous, fractional, and hedonic diversity games. The dynamics we consider is based on individual stability: an agent will join another coalition if she is better off and no member of the welcoming coalition is worse off. Our results are threefold. First, we identify conditions for the (fast) convergence of our dynamics. To this end, we develop new techniques based on the simultaneous usage of multiple intertwined potential functions and establish a reduction uncovering a close relationship between anonymous hedonic games and hedonic diversity games. Second, we provide elaborate counterexamples determining tight boundaries for the existence of individually stable partitions. Third, we study the computational complexity of problems related to the coalition formation dynamics. In particular, we settle open problems suggested by Bogomolnaia and Jackson, Brandl et al., and Boehmer and Elkind.","PeriodicalId":42216,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135822140","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nathanaël Gross-Humbert, Nawal Benabbou, A. Beynier, N. Maudet
We consider the problem of allocating indivisible items to agents where both agents and items are partitioned into disjoint groups. Following previous works on public housing allocation, each item (or house) belongs to a block (or building) and each agent is assigned a type (e.g., ethnicity group). The allocation problem consists in assigning at most one item to each agent in a good way while respecting diversity constraints. Based on Schelling’s seminal work, we introduce a generic individual utility function where the welfare of an agent not only relies on her preferences over the items but also takes into account the fraction of agents of her own type in her own block. In this context, we investigate the issue of stability, understood here as the absence of mutually improving swaps, and we define the cost of requiring it. Then, we study the behaviour of two existing allocation mechanisms: an adaptation of the sequential mechanism used in Singapore and a distributed procedure based on mutually improving swaps of items. We first present the theoretical properties of these two allocation mechanisms, and we then compare their performances in practice through an experimental study.
{"title":"Sequential and Swap Mechanisms for Public Housing Allocation with Quotas and Neighbourhood-based Utilities","authors":"Nathanaël Gross-Humbert, Nawal Benabbou, A. Beynier, N. Maudet","doi":"10.1145/3569704","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3569704","url":null,"abstract":"We consider the problem of allocating indivisible items to agents where both agents and items are partitioned into disjoint groups. Following previous works on public housing allocation, each item (or house) belongs to a block (or building) and each agent is assigned a type (e.g., ethnicity group). The allocation problem consists in assigning at most one item to each agent in a good way while respecting diversity constraints. Based on Schelling’s seminal work, we introduce a generic individual utility function where the welfare of an agent not only relies on her preferences over the items but also takes into account the fraction of agents of her own type in her own block. In this context, we investigate the issue of stability, understood here as the absence of mutually improving swaps, and we define the cost of requiring it. Then, we study the behaviour of two existing allocation mechanisms: an adaptation of the sequential mechanism used in Singapore and a distributed procedure based on mutually improving swaps of items. We first present the theoretical properties of these two allocation mechanisms, and we then compare their performances in practice through an experimental study.","PeriodicalId":42216,"journal":{"name":"ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation","volume":"10 1","pages":"1 - 24"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46763968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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