Online Auctions for Dynamic Assignment: Theory and Empirical Evaluation

Dynamic resource assignment is a common problem in multi-agent systems. We consider scenarios in which dynamic agents have preferences about assignments and the resources that can be assigned using online auctions. We study the trade-off between the following online auction properties: (i) truthfulness, (ii) expressiveness, (iii) efficiency, and (iv) average case performance. We theoretically and empirically compare four different online auctions: (i) Arrival Priority Serial Dictatorship, (ii) Split Dynamic VCG, (iii) e-Action, and (iv) Online Ranked Competition Auction. The latter is a novel design based on the competitive secretary problem. We show that, in addition to truthfulness and algorithmic efficiency, the degree of competition also plays an important role in selecting the best algorithm for a given context.

[1]  Joseph Naor,et al.  The Design of Competitive Online Algorithms via a Primal-Dual Approach , 2009, Found. Trends Theor. Comput. Sci..

[2]  David Lindley,et al.  Dynamic Programming and Decision Theory , 1961 .

[3]  Sujit Gujar,et al.  Tolerable Manipulability in Dynamic Assignment without Money , 2010, AAAI.

[4]  Mathijs de Weerdt,et al.  Introduction to Mechanism Design , 2009 .

[5]  Devavrat Shah,et al.  Budget-optimal crowdsourcing using low-rank matrix approximations , 2011, 2011 49th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton).

[6]  Nicole Immorlica,et al.  Secretary Problems with Competing Employers , 2006, WINE.

[7]  D. Bergemann,et al.  The Dynamic Pivot Mechanism , 2008 .

[8]  Thomas Kesselheim.  Introduction to Mechanism Design , 2018, Modeling Strategic Behavior.

[9]  Chien-Ju Ho,et al.  Adaptive Task Assignment for Crowdsourced Classification , 2013, ICML.

[10]  Anna Karlin,et al.  On a Competitive Secretary Problem , 2015, AAAI.

[11]  Richard M. Karp,et al.  An optimal algorithm for on-line bipartite matching , 1990, STOC '90.

[12]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Efficient Crowdsourcing of Unknown Experts using Multi-Armed Bandits , 2012, ECAI.

[13]  Nicole Immorlica,et al.  Online auctions and generalized secretary problems , 2008, SECO.

[14]  Nicole Immorlica,et al.  Matroids, secretary problems, and online mechanisms , 2007, SODA '07.

[15]  Sujit Gujar,et al.  Auction Based Mechanisms for Dynamic Task Assignments in Expert Crowdsourcing , 2015, AMEC/TADA.

[16]  Ilya Segal,et al.  An Efficient Dynamic Mechanism , 2013 .

[17]  Chien-Ju Ho,et al.  Online Task Assignment in Crowdsourcing Markets , 2012, AAAI.

[18]  Gagan Goel,et al.  Allocating tasks to workers with matching constraints: truthful mechanisms for crowdsourcing markets , 2014, WWW.

[19]  Xi Chen,et al.  Optimistic Knowledge Gradient Policy for Optimal Budget Allocation in Crowdsourcing , 2013, ICML.

[20]  David C. Parkes,et al.  Dynamic Incentive Mechanisms , 2010, AI Mag..