Interdependent Public Projects

04/17/2022
by   Avi Cohen, et al.
0

In the interdependent values (IDV) model introduced by Milgrom and Weber [1982], agents have private signals that capture their information about different social alternatives, and the valuation of every agent is a function of all agent signals. While interdependence has been mainly studied for auctions, it is extremely relevant for a large variety of social choice settings, including the canonical setting of public projects. The IDV model is very challenging relative to standard independent private values, and welfare guarantees have been achieved through two alternative conditions known as single-crossing and submodularity over signals (SOS). In either case, the existing theory falls short of solving the public projects setting. Our contribution is twofold: (i) We give a workable characterization of truthfulness for IDV public projects for the largest class of valuations for which such a characterization exists, and term this class decomposable valuations; (ii) We provide possibility and impossibility results for welfare approximation in public projects with SOS valuations. Our main impossibility result is that, in contrast to auctions, no universally truthful mechanism performs better for public projects with SOS valuations than choosing a project at random. Our main positive result applies to excludable public projects with SOS, for which we establish a constant factor approximation similar to auctions. Our results suggest that exclusion may be a key tool for achieving welfare guarantees in the IDV model.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
11/02/2021

Private Interdependent Valuations

We consider the single-item interdependent value setting, where there is...
research
11/25/2022

Combinatorial Civic Crowdfunding with Budgeted Agents: Welfare Optimality at Equilibrium and Optimal Deviation

Civic Crowdfunding (CC) uses the “power of the crowd” to garner contribu...
research
07/31/2019

Career Choice as an Extended Spatial Evolutionary Public Goods Game

We propose an extended spatial evolutionary public goods game (SEPGG) mo...
research
06/11/2018

Interdependent Values without Single-Crossing

We consider a setting where an auctioneer sells a single item to n poten...
research
03/01/2020

Participatory Budgeting: Models and Approaches

Participatory budgeting is a democratic approach to deciding the funding...
research
04/20/2022

Impacts of Public Information on Flexible Information Acquisition

Interacting agents receive public information at no cost and flexibly ac...
research
03/20/2019

Combinatorial Auctions with Interdependent Valuations: SOS to the Rescue

We study combinatorial auctions with interdependent valuations. In such ...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset