Hybrid Mechanisms: Trading off Strategyproofness and Efficiency of Random Assignment Mechanisms

Abstract: Severe impossibility results restrict the design of strategyproof random assignment mechanisms, and trade-offs are necessary when aiming for more demanding efficiency requirements, such as ordinal or rank efficiency. We introduce hybrid mechanisms, which are convex combinations of two component mechanisms. We give a set of conditions under which such hybrids facilitate a non-degenerate trade-off between strategyproofness (in terms of partial strategyproofness) and efficiency (in terms of dominance). This set of conditions is tight in the sense that trade-offs may become degenerate if any of the conditions are dropped. Moreover, we give an algorithm for the mechanism designer's problem of determining a maximal mixing factor. Finally, we prove that our construction can be applied to mix Random Serial Dictatorship with Probabilistic Serial, as well as with the adaptive Boston mechanism, and we illustrate the efficiency gains numerically.