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Novel Mechanisms For Allocation Of Heterogeneous Items In Strategic Settings

Allocation of objects or resources to competing agents is a ubiquitous problem in the real world. For example, a federal government may wish to allocate different types of spectrum licenses to telecom service providers; a search engine has to assign different sponsored slots to the ads of advertisers; etc. The agents involved in such situations have private preferences over the allocations. The agents, being strategic, may manipulate the allocation procedure to get a favourable allocation. If the objects to be allocated are heterogeneous (rather than homogeneous), the problem becomes quite complex. The allocation problem becomes even more formidable in the presence of a dynamic supply and/or demand. This doctoral work is motivated by such problems involving strategic agents, heterogeneous objects, and dynamic supply and/or demand. In this thesis, we model such problems in a standard game theoretic setting and use mechanism design to propose novel solutions to the problems. We extend the current state-of-the-art in a non-trivial way by solving the following problems:
Optimal combinatorial auctions with single minded bidders, generalizing the existing methods to take into account multiple units of heterogeneous objects
Multi-armed bandit mechanisms for sponsored search auctions with multiple slots, generalizing the current methods that only consider a single slot.
Strategyproof redistribution mechanisms for heterogeneous objects, expanding the scope of the current state of practice beyond homogeneous objects
Online allocation mechanisms without money for one-sided and two-sided matching markets, extending the existing methods for static settings.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:IISc/oai:etd.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in:2005/1654
Date10 1900
CreatorsPrakash, Gujar Sujit
ContributorsNarahari, Y
Source SetsIndia Institute of Science
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
RelationG24693

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