Simple mechanisms for subadditive buyers via duality
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
A central problem in mechanism design is how to design simple and approximately revenue-optimal auctions in multi-item multi-buyer settings. Prior to our work, all results only apply to cases where the buyers' valuations are linear over the items. We unify and improve all previous results, as well as generalize the results to accommodate non-linear valuations [Cai and Zhao 2017]. In particular, we prove that a simple, deterministic and Dominant Strategy Incentive Compatible (DSIC) mechanism, namely, the sequential posted price with entry fee mechanism, achieves a constant fraction of the optimal revenue among all randomized, Bayesian Incentive Compatible (BIC) mechanisms, when buyers' valuations are XOS (a superclass of submodular valuations) over independent items. If the buyers' valuations are subadditive over independent items, the approximation factor degrades to O (log m ), where m is the number of items. We obtain our results by first extending the Cai-Devanur-Weinberg duality framework to derive an effective benchmark of the optimal revenue for subadditive buyers, and then developing new analytic tools that combine concentration inequality of subadditive functions, prophet-inequality type of arguments, and a novel decomposition of the benchmark.
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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 | 0.002 | 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) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
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