IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0155962.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Mechanism for Fair Distribution of Resources without Payments

Author

Listed:
  • Evgenia Christoforou
  • Antonio Fernández Anta
  • Agustín Santos

Abstract

We design a mechanism for Fair and Efficient Distribution of Resources (FEDoR) in the presence of strategic agents. We consider a multiple-instances, Bayesian setting, where in each round the preference of an agent over the set of resources is a private information. We assume that in each of r rounds n agents are competing for k non-identical indivisible goods, (n > k). In each round the strategic agents declare how much they value receiving any of the goods in the specific round. The agent declaring the highest valuation receives the good with the highest value, the agent with the second highest valuation receives the second highest valued good, etc. Hence we assume a decision function that assigns goods to agents based on their valuations. The novelty of the mechanism is that no payment scheme is required to achieve truthfulness in a setting with rational/strategic agents. The FEDoR mechanism takes advantage of the repeated nature of the framework, and through a statistical test is able to punish the misreporting agents and be fair, truthful, and socially efficient. FEDoR is fair in the sense that, in expectation over the course of the rounds, all agents will receive the same good the same amount of times. FEDoR is an eligible candidate for applications that require fair distribution of resources over time. For example, equal share of bandwidth for nodes through the same point of access. But further on, FEDoR can be applied in less trivial settings like sponsored search, where payment is necessary and can be given in the form of a flat participation fee. FEDoR can be a good candidate in a setting like that to solve the problem of starvation of publicity slots for some advertisers that have a difficult time determining their true valuations. To this extent we perform a comparison with traditional mechanisms applied to sponsored search, presenting the advantage of FEDoR.

Suggested Citation

  • Evgenia Christoforou & Antonio Fernández Anta & Agustín Santos, 2016. "A Mechanism for Fair Distribution of Resources without Payments," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(5), pages 1-20, May.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0155962
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0155962
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0155962
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0155962&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0155962?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Benjamin Edelman & Michael Ostrovsky & Michael Schwarz, 2007. "Internet Advertising and the Generalized Second-Price Auction: Selling Billions of Dollars Worth of Keywords," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(1), pages 242-259, March.
    2. Matthew O Jackson & Hugo F Sonnenschein, 2007. "Overcoming Incentive Constraints by Linking Decisions -super-1," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 75(1), pages 241-257, January.
    3. Satterthwaite, Mark Allen, 1975. "Strategy-proofness and Arrow's conditions: Existence and correspondence theorems for voting procedures and social welfare functions," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 187-217, April.
    4. Agustín Santos & Antonio Fernández Anta & Luis López Fernández, 2013. "Quid Pro Quo: A Mechanism for Fair Collaboration in Networked Systems," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(9), pages 1-15, September.
    5. Unknown, 2005. "Internet Advertising and the Generalized Second Price Auction: Selling Billions of Dollars Worth of Keywords," Department of Economics, Working Paper Series qt8w16v26k, Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Rafael Hortala-Vallve, 2012. "Qualitative voting," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 24(4), pages 526-554, October.
    2. Axel Ockenfels & David Reiley & Abdolkarim Sadrieh, 2006. "Online Auctions," NBER Working Papers 12785, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Bierbrauer, Felix & Winkelmann, Justus, 2020. "All or nothing: State capacity and optimal public goods provision," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 185(C).
    4. Börgers, Tilman & Postl, Peter, 2009. "Efficient compromising," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 144(5), pages 2057-2076, September.
    5. Kazuya Kikuchi & Yukio Koriyama, 2023. "A General Impossibility Theorem on Pareto Efficiency and Bayesian Incentive Compatibility," Papers 2303.05968, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2024.
    6. Kim, Semin, 2017. "Ordinal versus cardinal voting rules: A mechanism design approach," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 104(C), pages 350-371.
    7. Felix Bierbrauer & Justus Winkelmann, 2018. "All or Nothing: State Capacity and Optimal Public Goods Provision," CESifo Working Paper Series 7238, CESifo.
    8. Mueller-Frank, Manuel & M. Pai, Mallesh, 2015. "Do Online Social Networks Increase Welfare?," IESE Research Papers D/1118, IESE Business School.
    9. Tobias Rachidi, 2020. "Optimal Voting Mechanisms on Generalized Single-Peaked Domains," CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series crctr224_2020_214, University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany.
    10. Urs Fischbacher & Simeon Schudy, 2020. "Agenda Control And Reciprocity In Sequential Voting Decisions," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 58(4), pages 1813-1829, October.
    11. Rafael Hortala-Vallve, 2010. "Inefficiencies on linking decisions," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 34(3), pages 471-486, March.
    12. Semin Kim, 2016. "Ordinal Versus Cardinal Voting Rules: A Mechanism Design Approach," Working papers 2016rwp-94, Yonsei University, Yonsei Economics Research Institute.
    13. Feldman, Michal & Fu, Hu & Gravin, Nick & Lucier, Brendan, 2020. "Simultaneous auctions without complements are (almost) efficient," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 123(C), pages 327-341.
    14. Yongmin Chen & Chuan He, 2011. "Paid Placement: Advertising and Search on the Internet," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 121(556), pages 309-328, November.
    15. Alex Gershkov & Benny Moldovanu & Xianwen Shi, 2017. "Optimal Voting Rules," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 84(2), pages 688-717.
    16. Snehalkumar & S. Gaikwad & Durim Morina & Adam Ginzberg & Catherine Mullings & Shirish Goyal & Dilrukshi Gamage & Christopher Diemert & Mathias Burton & Sharon Zhou & Mark Whiting & Karolina Ziulkoski, 2019. "Boomerang: Rebounding the Consequences of Reputation Feedback on Crowdsourcing Platforms," Papers 1904.06722, arXiv.org.
    17. Alex Gershkov & Benny Moldovanu & Xianwen Shi, 2013. "Optimal Mechanism Design without Money," Working Papers tecipa-481, University of Toronto, Department of Economics.
    18. Dengji Zhao, 2021. "Mechanism Design Powered by Social Interactions," Papers 2102.10347, arXiv.org.
    19. Ning Chen & Xiaotie Deng & Paul W. Goldberg & Jinshan Zhang, 2016. "On revenue maximization with sharp multi-unit demands," Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, Springer, vol. 31(3), pages 1174-1205, April.
    20. D Laffey & C Hunka & J A Sharp & Z Zeng, 2009. "Estimating advertisers' values for paid search clickthroughs," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 60(3), pages 411-418, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0155962. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.