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On the Impossibility of Black-Box Transformations in Mechanism Design

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Algorithmic Game Theory (SAGT 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 8768))

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Abstract

A fundamental question in algorithmic mechanism design is whether any approximation algorithm for a single-parameter social-welfare maximization problem can be turned into a dominant-strategy truthful mechanism for the same problem (while preserving the approximation ratio up to a constant factor). A particularly desirable type of transformations—called black-box transformations—achieve the above goal by only accessing the approximation algorithm as a black box.

A recent work by Chawla, Immorlica and Lucier (STOC 2012) demonstrates (unconditionally) the impossibility of certain restricted classes of black-box transformations—where the tranformation is oblivious to the feasibility constrain of the optimization problem. In this work, we remove these restrictions under standard complexity-theoretic assumptions: Assuming the existence of one-way functions, we show the impossibility of all black-box transformations.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cornell University, USA

    Rafael Pass & Karn Seth

Authors
  1. Rafael Pass
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  2. Karn Seth
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Israel

    Ron Lavi

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Pass, R., Seth, K. (2014). On the Impossibility of Black-Box Transformations in Mechanism Design. In: Lavi, R. (eds) Algorithmic Game Theory. SAGT 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8768. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44803-8_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44803-8_24

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-44802-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-44803-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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