Price-Based Information Certificates for Minimal-Revelation Combinatorial Auctions

The equilibrium of the direct-revelation Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism for combinatorial auctions requires every agent to provide complete information about its preferences. Not only is this unreasonable in settings with costly preference evaluation, but moreover it is often possible to implement the same outcome with incomplete preference information. We formalize the problem of minimal-revelation mechanism design and introduce the concept of minimal information certificates. Linear programming duality theory proves that a class of price-based information certificates are both necessary and sufficient to compute an efficient allocation in a dominant strategy mechanism.

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