Improved Truthful Mechanisms for Subadditive Combinatorial Auctions: Breaking the Logarithmic Barrier

10/03/2020

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by   Sepehr Assadi, et al.

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We present a computationally-efficient truthful mechanism for combinatorial auctions with subadditive bidders that achieves an O((loglogm)^3)-approximation to the maximum welfare in expectation using O(n) demand queries; here m and n are the number of items and bidders, respectively. This breaks the longstanding logarithmic barrier for the problem dating back to the O(logm·loglogm)-approximation mechanism of Dobzinski from 2007. Along the way, we also improve and considerably simplify the state-of-the-art mechanisms for submodular bidders.