Abstract
Roberts’ theorem from 1979 states that the only incentive compatible mechanisms over a full domain and range of at least 3 are weighted variants of the VCG mechanism termed affine maximizers. Roberts’ proof is somewhat “magical” and we provide a new “modular” proof. We hope that this proof will help in future efforts to extend the theorem to non-full domains such as combinatorial auctions or scheduling.
Supported by the Adams Fellowship Program of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and by a grant from the Israel Academy of Sciences.
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Dobzinski, S., Nisan, N. (2009). A Modular Approach to Roberts’ Theorem. In: Mavronicolas, M., Papadopoulou, V.G. (eds) Algorithmic Game Theory. SAGT 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5814. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04645-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04645-2_3
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