Multidimensional Budget-Feasible Mechanism Design

Abstract: In budget-feasible mechanism design, a buyer wishes to procure a set of items of maximum value from self-interested players. We have a valuation function $v:2^U \to \mathbb{R}+$, where $U$ is the set of all items, where $v(S)$ specifies the value obtained from set $S$ of items. The entirety of current work on budget-feasible mechanisms has focused on the single-dimensional setting, wherein each player holds a single item $e$ and incurs a private cost $c_e$ for supplying item $e$. We introduce multidimensional budget feasible mechanism design: the universe $U$ is now partitioned into item-sets ${G_i}$ held by the different players, and each player $i$ incurs a private cost $c_i(S_i)$ for supplying the set $S_i\subseteq G_i$ of items. A budget-feasible mechanism is a mechanism that is truthful, and where the total payment made to the players is at most some given budget $B$. The goal is to devise a budget-feasible mechanism that procures a set of items of large value. We obtain the first approximation guarantees for multidimensional budget feasible mechanism design. Our contributions are threefold. First, we prove an impossibility result showing that the standard benchmark used in single-dimensional budget-feasible mechanism design, namely the algorithmic optimum is inadequate in that no budget-feasible mechanism can achieve good approximation relative to this. We identify that the chief underlying issue here is that there could be a monopolist which prevents a budget-feasible mechanism from obtaining good guarantees. Second, we devise an alternate benchmark, $OPT{Bench}$, that allows for meaningful approximation guarantees, thereby yielding a metric for comparing mechanisms. Third, we devise budget-feasible mechanisms that achieve constant-factor approximation guarantees with respect to this benchmark for XOS valuations.