On the Hardness of Being Truthful

被引:49
作者
Papadimitriou, Christos [1 ]
Schapira, Michael [2 ]
Singer, Yaron [1 ]
机构
[1] Univ Calif Berkeley, Div Comp Sci, Berkeley, CA 94720 USA
[2] Hebrew Univ Jerusalem, Sch Engn & Comp Sci, IL-91905 Jerusalem, Israel
来源
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 49TH ANNUAL IEEE SYMPOSIUM ON FOUNDATIONS OF COMPUTER SCIENCE | 2008年
关键词
D O I
10.1109/FOCS.2008.54
中图分类号
TP301 [理论、方法];
学科分类号
081202 ;
摘要
The central problem in computational mechanism design is the tension between incentive compatibility and computational efficiency. We establish the first significant approximability gap between algorithms that are both truthful and computationally-efficient, and algorithms that only achieve one of these two desiderata. This is shown in the context of a novel mechanism design problem which we call the COMBINATORIAL PUBLIC PROJECT PROBLEM (CPPP). CPPP is an abstraction of many common mechanism design situations, ranging from elections of kibbutz committees to network design. Our result is actually made up. of two complementary results - one in the communication-complexity model and one in the computational-complexity model. Both these hardness results heavily rely on a combinatorial characterization of truthful algorithms for our problem. Our computational-complexity result is one of the first impossibility results connecting mechanism design to complexity theory; its novel proof technique involves an application of the Sauer-Shelah Lemma and may be of wider applicability, both within and without mechanism design.
引用
收藏
页码:250 / +
页数:2
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