Coverage, matching, and beyond: New results on budgeted mechanism design

Abstract

We study a type of reverse (procurement) auction problems in the presence of budget constraints. The general algorithmic problem is to purchase a set of resources, which come at a cost, so as not to exceed a given budget and at the same time maximize a given valuation function. This framework captures the budgeted version of several well known optimization problems, and when the resources are owned by strategic agents the goal is to design truthful and budget feasible mechanisms. We first obtain mechanisms with an improved approximation ratio for weighted coverage valuations, a special class of submodular functions. We then provide a general scheme for designing randomized and deterministic polynomial time mechanisms for a class of XOS problems. This class contains problems whose feasible set forms an independence system (a more general structure than matroids), and some representative problems include, among others, finding maximum weighted matchings and maximum weighted matroid members. For most of these problems, only randomized mechanisms with very high approximation ratios were known prior to our results.