Abstract
Computational issues are important in mechanism design, but have received insufficient research interest. This article briefly reviews some of the key ideas. I discuss computing by the centre, such as an auction server or vote aggregator, and computing by the agents, be they human or software. Limited computing hinders mechanism design in several ways, and presents deep strategic interactions between computing and incentives. On the bright side, novel algorithms and increasing computing power have enabled better mechanisms. Perhaps most interestingly, with computationally limited agents, one can implement mechanisms that would not be implementable among computationally unlimited agents.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Banks, J.S., J. Ledyard, and D. Porter. 1989. Allocating uncertain and unresponsive resources: An experimental approach. RAND Journal of Economics 20: 1–25.
Bartholdi, J. III, and J. Orlin. 1991. Single transferable vote resists strategic voting. Social Choice and Welfare 8: 341–354.
Bartholdi, J. III, C. Tovey, and M. Trick. 1989. The computational difficulty of manipulating an election. Social Choice and Welfare 6: 227–241.
Bichler, M., A. Davenport, G. Hohner, and J. Kalagnanam. 2006. Industrial procurement auctions. In Combinatorial auctions, ed. Cramton, Shoham, and Steinberg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Blumrosen, L., and N. Nisan. 2005. On the computational power of iterative auctions. In Proceedings of the ACM conference on electronic commerce, 29–43. Vancouver: ACM Press.
Brandt F, andSandholm T. 2004. (Im)possibility of unconditionally privacypreserving auctions. In Proceedings of the international conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.810–17.
Brandt F., and T. Sandholm. 2005. Unconditional privacy in social choice. In Proceedings of the conference on theoretical aspects of rationality and knowledge. 207–18.
Conen W., and T. Sandholm. 2001. Preference elicitation in combinatorial auctions: Extended abstract. In Proceedings of the ACM conference on electronic commerce, 256–9. More detailed description of algorithmic aspects in Proceedings of the IJCAI01 workshop on economic agents, models, and mechanisms. 71–80.
Conitzer V., and T. Sandholm. 2002. Complexity of mechanism design. In Proceedings of the conference on uncertainty in artificial intelligence. 103–10.
Conitzer V., and T. Sandholm. 2003. Universal voting protocol tweaks to make manipulation hard. In Proceedings of the international joint conference on artificial intelligence. 781–8.
Conitzer V., and T. Sandholm. 2004. Computational criticisms of the revelation principle. In Conference on logic and the foundations of game and decision theory. Earlier versions: AMEC-03, EC-04.
Conitzer V., and T. Sandholm. 2006. Nonexistence of voting rules that are usually hard to manipulate. In Proceedings of the national conference on artificial intelligence.
Conitzer, V., T. Sandholm, and J. Lang. 2007. When are elections with few candidates hard to manipulate? Journal of the ACM 54(3): 14.
Cramton, P., Y. Shoham, and R. Steinberg, ed. 2006. Combinatorial auctions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Feigenbaum, J., C. Papadimitriou, R. Sami, and S. Shenker. 2005. A BGP-based mechanism for lowest cost routing. Distributed Computing 18: 61–72.
Feigenbaum J., and S. Shenker. 2002. Distributed algorithmic mechanism design: Recent results and future directions. In Proceedings of the international workshop on discrete algorithms and methods for mobile computing and communications. 1–13.
Goldreich O., S. Micali and A. Wigderson. 1987. How to play any mental game or a completeness theorem for protocols with honest majority. In Proceedings of the symposium on theory of computing. 218–29.
Hajiaghayi, M.T., R. Kleinberg,and T. Sandholm. 2007. Automated online mechanism design and prophet inequalities. In Proceedings of the national conference on artificial intelligence.
Hershberger J, and S. Suri. 2001. Vickrey prices and shortest paths: What is an edge worth? In Proceedings of the symposium on foundations of computer Science. 252–9.
Jurca R, and B. Faltings. 2006. Minimum payments that reward honest reputation feedback. In Proceedings of the ACM conference on electronic commerce. 190–9.
Kfir-Dahav N, D. Monderer, and M. Tennenholtz. 2000. Mechanism design for resource bounded agents. In Proceedings of the international conference on multi-agent systems. 309–315.
Land, A., S. Powell, and R. Steinberg. 2006. PAUSE: A computationally tractable combinatorial auction. In Combinatorial auctions, ed. Cramton, Shoham, and Steinberg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Larson K. 2006. Reducing costly information acquisition in auctions. In Proceedings of the autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. 1167–74.
Larson K., and T. Sandholm. 2001. Costly valuation computation in auctions. In Proceedings of the theoretical aspects of rationality and knowledge. 169–182.
Larson K, and T. Sandholm. 2005. Mechanism design and deliberative agents. In Proceedings of the international conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. 650–656.
Lavi R., and C. Swamy. 2005. Truthful and near-optimal mechanism design via linear programming. In Proceedings of the symposium on foundations of computer science. 595–604.
Lehmann D., R. Müller, and T. Sandholm. 2006. The winner determination problem. In P. Cramton, Y. Shoham and R. Steinberg.
Lehmann, D., L.I. O’Callaghan, and Y. Shoham. 2002. Truth revelation in rapid, approximately efficient combinatorial auctions. Journal of the ACM 49: 577–602.
Likhodedov A, and T. Sandholm. 2005. Approximating revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions. In Proceedings of the national conference on artificial intelligence. 267–74.
Monderer D, and M. Tennenholtz. 1999. Distributed games: From mechanisms to protocols. In Proceedings of the national conference on artificial intelligence. 32–7.
Müller R. 2006. Tractable cases of the winner determination problem. In P. Cramton, Y. Shoham and R. Steinberg.
Nisan N, and A. Ronen. 2000. Computationally feasible VCG mechanisms. In Proceedings of the ACM conference on electronic commerce. 242–52.
Nisan, N., and A. Ronen. 2001. Algorithmic mechanism design. Games and Economic Behavior 35: 166–196.
Nisan, N., and I. Segal. 2006. The communication requirements of efficient allocations and supporting prices. Journal of Economic Theory 129: 192–224.
Parkes D., and J. Shneidman. 2004. Distributed implementations of generalized Vickrey–Clarke–Groves auctions. In Proceedings of the international conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. 261–268.
Petcu A., B. Faltings, and D. Parkes. 2006. MDPOP: Faithful distributed implementation of efficient social choice problems. In Proceedings of the international conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. 1397–404.
Rothkopf, M. 2007. Thirteen reasons why the Vickrey–Clarke–Groves process is not practical. Operations Research 55: 191–197.
Rothkopf, M., A. Pekěc, and R. Harstad. 1998. Computationally manageable combinatorial auctions. Management Science 44: 1131–1147.
Sandholm T. 1993. An implementation of the contract net protocol based on marginal cost calculations. In Proceedings of the national conference on artificial intelligence. 256–62.
Sandholm, T. 2000. Issues in computational Vickrey auctions. International Journal of Electronic Commerce 4: 107–129 .Early version in ICMAS-96.
Sandholm, T. 2002a. Algorithm for optimal winner determination in combinatorial auctions. Artificial Intelligence 135: 1–54 .Earlier versions: ICE-98 keynote, Washington U. tech report WUCS-99-01 Jan. 1999, IJCAI-99.
Sandholm, T. 2002b. eMediator: A next generation electronic commerce server. Computational Intelligence 18: 656–676 .Earlier versions: Washington U. tech report WU-CS-99-02 Jan. 1999, AAAI-99 Workshop on AI in Ecommerce, AGENTS-00.
Sandholm T. 2006. Optimal winner determination algorithms. In P. Cramton, Y. Shoham and R. Steinberg.
Sandholm, T. 2007. Expressive commerce and its application to sourcing: How we conducted $35 billion of generalized combinatorial auctions. AI Magazine 28(3): 45–58.
Sandholm T, and Boutilier C. 2006. Preference elicitation in combinatorial auctions. In P. Cramton, Y. Shoham and R. Steinberg.
Sandholm T, V. Conitzer, and C. Boutilier. 2007. Automated design of multistage mechanisms. In Proceedings of the international joint conference on artificial intelligence. 1500–6.
Sandholm T., and V. Ferrandon. 2000. Safe exchange planner. In Proceedings of the international conference on multi-agent systems. 255–62.
Sandholm, T., K. Larson, M. Andersson, O. Shehory, et al. 1999. Coalition structure generation with worst case guarantees. Artificial Intelligence 111: 209–238.
Shneidman J, and D.C Parkes . 2004. Specification faithfulness in networks with rational nodes. In Proceedings of the ACM symposium on principles of distributed computing. 88–97.
Vorobeychik Y, C. Kiekintveld, and M. Wellman. 2006. Empirical mechanism design: Methods, with application to a supply chain scenario. In Proceedings of the ACM conference on electronic commerce. 306–15.
Acknowledgment
This work was funded by the National Science Foundation under ITR grant IIS0427858, and a Sloan Foundation Fellowship. I thank Felix Brandt, Christina Fong, Joe Halpern, and David Parkes for helpful comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2018 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
About this entry
Cite this entry
Sandholm, T. (2018). Computing in Mechanism Design. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2327
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2327
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-95188-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-95189-5
eBook Packages: Economics and FinanceReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences