Social welfare in one-sided matching mechanisms

Conference item

We study the Price of Anarchy of mechanisms for the wellknown problem of one-sided matching, or house allocation, with respect to the social welfare objective. We consider both ordinal mechanisms, where agents submit preference lists over the items, and cardinal mechanisms, where agents may submit numerical values for the items being allocated. We present a general lower bound of Ω(√ n) on the Price of Anarchy, which applies to all mechanisms. We show that two well-known mechanisms, Probabilistic Serial, and Random Priority, achieve a matching upper bound. We extend our lower bound to the Price of Stability of a large class of mechanisms that satisfy a common proportionality property, and show stronger bounds on the Price of Anarchy of all deterministic mechanisms.

Authors: Christodoulou, G; Filos-Ratsikas, A; Frederiksen, S; Goldberg, P; Zhang, J

• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
• Host title: Proceedings of the 2016 international conference on Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems
• Publication date: 2016-01-01
• Keywords: probabilistic serial; truthfulness; Nash equilibrium; one-sided matching; price of anarchy