论文标题
不要掷骰子,问两次:匹配问题及其他
Don't Roll the Dice, Ask Twice: The Two-Query Distortion of Matching Problems and Beyond
论文作者
论文摘要
在大多数社会选择环境中,参与的代理商以线性顺序的形式表达了对不同替代方案的偏好。尽管这显然简化了偏好的启发,但由于代理人的价值观几乎未知,因此不可避免地会导致优化基本目标(例如社会福利)的性能差。由于缺乏信息的性能损失是通过失真概念来衡量的。最近的一系列作品提出了设计机制的议程,这些机制通过查询了解少数替代方案的代理值,并使用此有限的额外信息来做出更明智的决策,从而改善失真。遵循此议程,在这项工作中,我们关注一类组合问题,其中包括最著名的匹配问题和它们的几种概括,例如单方面匹配,双面匹配,一般图形匹配和$ k $受限的资源分配。我们设计的两种质量机制在社会福利方面实现了最好的最坏情况扭曲,并且优于随机序数机制所实现的最佳预期失真。
In most social choice settings, the participating agents express their preferences over the different alternatives in the form of linear orderings. While this clearly simplifies preference elicitation, it inevitably leads to poor performance with respect to optimizing a cardinal objective, such as the social welfare, since the values of the agents remain virtually unknown. This loss in performance because of lack of information is measured by the notion of distortion. A recent array of works put forward the agenda of designing mechanisms that learn the values of the agents for a small number of alternatives via queries, and use this limited extra information to make better-informed decisions, thus improving distortion. Following this agenda, in this work we focus on a class of combinatorial problems that includes most well-known matching problems and several of their generalizations, such as One-Sided Matching, Two-Sided Matching, General Graph Matching, and $k$-Constrained Resource Allocation. We design two-query mechanisms that achieve the best-possible worst-case distortion in terms of social welfare, and outperform the best-possible expected distortion achieved by randomized ordinal mechanisms.