Truthful and Near-Optimal Mechanism Design via Linear Programming
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We give a general technique to obtain approximation mechanisms that are truthful in expectation. We show that for packing domains, any α -approximation algorithm that also bounds the integrality gap of the LP relaxation of the problem by α can be used to construct an α -approximation mechanism that is truthful in expectation. This immediately yields a variety of new and significantly improved results for various problem domains and furthermore, yields truthful (in expectation) mechanisms with guarantees that match the best-known approximation guarantees when truthfulness is not required. In particular, we obtain the first truthful mechanisms with approximation guarantees for a variety of multiparameter domains. We obtain truthful (in expectation) mechanisms achieving approximation guarantees of O (√ m ) for combinatorial auctions (CAs), (1 + ϵ ) for multiunit CAs with B = Ω (log m ) copies of each item, and 2 for multiparameter knapsack problems (multi-unit auctions). Our construction is based on considering an LP relaxation of the problem and using the classic VCG mechanism to obtain a truthful mechanism in this fractional domain. We argue that the (fractional) optimal solution scaled down by α , where α is the integrality gap of the problem, can be represented as a convex combination of integer solutions, and by viewing this convex combination as specifying a probability distribution over integer solutions, we get a randomized, truthful in expectation mechanism. Our construction can be seen as a way of exploiting VCG in a computational tractable way even when the underlying social-welfare maximization problem is NP -hard.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it