EC

This paper initiates research on the foundations of ranking systems, a fundamental ingredient of basic e-commerce and Internet Technologies. In order to understand the essence and the exact rationale of page ranking algorithms we suggest the axiomatic ...

When distributing digital content over a broadcast channel it's often necessary to revoke users whose access privileges have expired, thus preventing them from recovering the content. This works well when users make a conscious decision to leave the ...

Business-to-business electronic contracts provide a specification of the agreed value exchange and guarantee legal protection to companies during electronic trading relations. Important features that distinguish e-contracts from traditional paper ...

We embark on a systematic analysis of the power and limitations of iterative combinatorial auctions. Most existing iterative combinatorial auctions are based on repeatedly suggesting prices for bundles of items, and querying the bidders for their "...

We study a multi-unit auction with multiple bidders, each of whom has a private valuation and a budget. The truthful mechanisms of such an auction are characterized, in the sense that, under standard assumptions, we prove that it is impossible to design ...

We study two problems, that of computing social optimum and that of finding fair allocations, in the congestion game model of Milchtaich[8] Although we show that the general problem is hard to approximate to any factor, we give simple algorithms for ...

In this paper, we examine the relative forecast accuracy of information markets versus expert aggregation. We leverage a unique data source of almost 2000 people's subjective probability judgments on 2003 US National Football League games and compare ...

Copyright holders have been investigating technological solutions to prevent distribution of copyrighted materials in peer-to-peer file sharing networks. A particularly popular technique consists in "poisoning" a specific item (movie, song, or software ...

We determine the communication complexity of the common voting rules. The rules (sorted by their communication complexity from low to high) are plurality, plurality with runoff, single transferable vote (STV), Condorcet, approval, Bucklin, cup, maximin, ...

We study various computational aspects of solving games using dominance and iterated dominance. We first study both strict and weak dominance (not iterated), and show that checking whether a given strategy is dominated by some mixed strategy can be done ...

In this paper we consider a common form of the English auction that is widely used in online Internet auctions. This discrete bid auction requires that the bidders may only submit bids which meet some predetermined discrete bid levels and, thus, there ...

We address the problem of lowering the buyer's expected payments in shortest path auctions, where the buyer's goal is to purchase a path in a graph in which edges are owned by selfish agents. We show that by deleting some of the edges of the graph, one ...

In multi-hop networks, the actions taken by individual intermediate nodes are typically hidden from the communicating endpoints; all the endpoints can observe is whether or not the end-to-end transmission was successful. Therefore, in the absence of ...

In this paper we formulate the fixed budget resource allocation game to understand the performance of a distributed market-based resource allocation system. Multiple users decide how to distribute their budget bids) among multiple machines according to ...

We model the Internet as a collection of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that transit and peer to meet an exogenous demand for the transport of IP traffic among an arbitrary set of cities. The prices of bandwidth and of transit are also exogenous. ...

Typically, when a borrower (Bob) wishes to establish a tradeline (e.g., a mortgage, an automobile loan, or a credit card) with a lender (Linda), Bob is subjected to a credit check by Linda. The credit check is done by having Linda obtain financial ...

This paper is a preliminary exploration of secure distributed human computation. We consider the general paradigm of using large-scale distributed computation to solve difficult problems, but where humans can act as agents and provide candidate ...

This paper concerns the design of mechanisms for online scheduling in which agents bid for access to a re-usable resource such as processor time or wireless network access. Each agent is assumed to arrive and depart dynamically, and in the basic model ...

We investigate the class of single-round, sealed-bid auctions for a set of identical items to bidders who each desire one unit. We adopt the worst-case competitive framework defined by [9, 5] that compares the profit of an auction to that of an optimal ...

Bids submitted in auctions are usually treated as enforceable commitments in most bidding and auction theory literature. In reality bidders often withdraw winning bids before the transaction when it is in their best interests to do so. Given a bid ...

We present a new approach to representing coalitional games based on rules that describe the marginal contributions of the agents. This representation scheme captures characteristics of the interactions among the agents in a natural and concise manner. ...

We study first-price auction mechanisms for auctioning flow between given nodes in a graph. A first-price auction is any auction in which links on winning paths are paid their bid amount; the designer has flexibility in specifying remaining details. We ...

The family of Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanisms is arguably the most celebrated achievement in truthful mechanism design. However, VCG mechanisms have their limitations. They only apply to optimization problems with a utilitarian (or affine) ...

Analysis of usage history for a large panel of eBay sellers suggests that both seller and buyer behavior change in response to changes in a seller's feedback profile. Sellers are more likely to stop listing items right after receiving a negative ...

A set of jobs need to be served by a single server which can serve only one job at a time. Jobs have processing times and incur waiting costs (linear in their waiting time). The jobs share their costs through compensation using monetary transfers. We ...

Algorithmic Mechanism Design focuses on Dominant Strategy Implementations. The main positive results are the celebrated Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanisms and computationally efficient mechanisms for severely restricted players ("single-parameter ...

We present the first design for a fully expressive iterative combinatorial exchange (ICE). The exchange incorporates a tree-based bidding language that is concise and expressive for CEs. Bidders specify lower and upper bounds on their value for ...

We introduce a new class of games, congestion games with failures (CGFs), which extends the class of congestion games to allow for facility failures. In a basic CGF (BCGF) agents share a common set of facilities (service providers), where each service ...

In a previously reported user study, we found that users were able to perform decision tradeoff tasks more efficiently and commit considerably fewer errors with the example critiquing interface than with the ranked list. We concluded that example-based ...

In almost every procurement situation, non-price attributes of the items to be purchased play a crucial role. Procurement protocols which take these attributes into account are called multi-attribute auctions.We study the following problem called ...