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Register a new userComputational Hardness of the Hylland-Zeckhauser Scheme
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Binghui Peng
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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We study the complexity of the classic Hylland-Zeckhauser scheme [HZ79] for one-sided matching markets. We show that the problem of finding an $epsilon$-approximate equilibrium in the HZ scheme is PPAD-hard, and this holds even when $epsilon$ is polynomially small and when each agent has no more than four distinct utility values. Our hardness result, when combined with the PPAD membership result of [VY21], resolves the approximation complexity of the HZ scheme. We also show that the problem of approximating the optimal social welfare (the weight of the matching) achievable by HZ equilibria within a certain constant factor is NP-hard.
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In 1979, Hylland and Zeckhauser cite{hylland} gave a simple and general scheme for implementing a one-sided matching market using the power of a pricing mechanism. Their method has nice properties -- it is incentive compatible in the large and produces an allocation that is Pareto optimal -- and hence it provides an attractive, off-the-shelf method for running an application involving such a market. With matching markets becoming ever more prevalant and impactful, it is imperative to finally settle the computational complexity of this scheme. We present the following partial resolution: 1. A combinatorial, strongly polynomial time algorithm for the special case of $0/1$ utilities. 2. An example that has only irrational equilibria, hence proving that this problem is not in PPAD. Furthermore, its equilibria are disconnected, hence showing that the problem does not admit a convex programming formulation. 3. A proof of membership of the problem in the class FIXP. We leave open the (difficult) question of determining if the problem is FIXP-hard. Settling the status of the special case when utilities are in the set ${0, {frac 1 2}, 1 }$ appears to be even more difficult.
In many settings, people exhibit behavior that is inconsistent across time --- we allocate a block of time to get work done and then procrastinate, or put effort into a project and then later fail to complete it. An active line of research in behavioral economics and related fields has developed and analyzed models for this type of time-inconsistent behavior. Here we propose a graph-theoretic model of tasks and goals, in which dependencies among actions are represented by a directed graph, and a time-inconsistent agent constructs a path through this graph. We first show how instances of this path-finding problem on different input graphs can reconstruct a wide range of qualitative phenomena observed in the literature on time-inconsistency, including procrastination, abandonment of long-range tasks, and the benefits of reduced sets of choices. We then explore a set of analyses that quantify over the set of all graphs; among other results, we find that in any graph, there can be only polynomially many distinct forms of time-inconsistent behavior; and any graph in which a time-inconsistent agent incurs significantly more cost than an optimal agent must contain a large procrastination structure as a minor. Finally, we use this graph-theoretic model to explore ways in which tasks can be designed to help motivate agents to reach designated goals.
Computational advertising has been studied to design efficient marketing strategies that maximize the number of acquired customers. In an increased competitive market, however, a market leader (a leader) requires the acquisition of new customers as well as the retention of her loyal customers because there often exists a competitor (a follower) who tries to attract customers away from the market leader. In this paper, we formalize a new model called the Stackelberg budget allocation game with a bipartite influence model by extending a budget allocation problem over a bipartite graph to a Stackelberg game. To find a strong Stackelberg equilibrium, a standard solution concept of the Stackelberg game, we propose two algorithms: an approximation algorithm with provable guarantees and an efficient heuristic algorithm. In addition, for a special case where customers are disjoint, we propose an exact algorithm based on linear programming. Our experiments using real-world datasets demonstrate that our algorithms outperform a baseline algorithm even when the follower is a powerful competitor.
We study the problem of approximating the value of a Unique Game instance in the streaming model. A simple count of the number of constraints divided by $p$, the alphabet size of the Unique Game, gives a trivial $p$-approximation that can be computed in $O(log n)$ space. Meanwhile, with high probability, a sample of $tilde{O}(n)$ constraints suffices to estimate the optimal value to $(1+epsilon)$ accuracy. We prove that any single-pass streaming algorithm that achieves a $(p-epsilon)$-approximation requires $Omega_epsilon(sqrt{n})$ space. Our proof is via a reduction from lower bounds for a communication problem that is a $p$-ary variant of the Boolean Hidden Matching problem studied in the literature. Given the utility of Unique Games as a starting point for reduction to other optimization problems, our strong hardness for approximating Unique Games could lead to downemph{stream} hardness results for streaming approximability for other CSP-like problems.
The phenomenon of residential segregation was captured by Schellings famous segregation model where two types of agents are placed on a grid and an agent is content with her location if the fraction of her neighbors which have the same type as her is at least $tau$, for some $0<tau<1$. Discontent agents simply swap their location with a randomly chosen other discontent agent or jump to a random empty cell. We analyze a generalized game-theoretic model of Schelling segregation which allows more than two agent types and more general underlying graphs modeling the residential area. For this we show that both aspects heavily influence the dynamic properties and the tractability of finding an optimal placement. We map the boundary of when improving response dynamics (IRD), i.e., the natural approach for finding equilibrium states, are guaranteed to converge. For this we prove several sharp threshold results where guaranteed IRD convergence suddenly turns into the strongest possible non-convergence result: a violation of weak acyclicity. In particular, we show such threshold results also for Schellings original model, which is in contrast to the standard assumption in many empirical papers. Furthermore, we show that in case of convergence, IRD find an equilibrium in $mathcal{O}(m)$ steps, where $m$ is the number of edges in the underlying graph and show that this bound is met in empirical simulations starting from random initial agent placements.
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