We study the excludable public project model where the decision is binary (build or not build). In a classic excludable and binary public project model, an agent either consumes the project in its whole or is completely excluded. We study a setting where the mechanism can set different project release time for different agents, in the sense that high-paying agents can consume the project earlier than low-paying agents. The release delay, while hurting the social welfare, is implemented to incentivize payments to cover the project cost. The mechanism design objective is to minimize the maximum release delay and the total release delay among all agents. We first consider the setting where we know the prior distribution of the agents' types. Our objectives are minimizing the expected maximum release delay and the expected total release delay. We propose the single deadline mechanisms. We show that the optimal single deadline mechanism is asymptotically optimal for both objectives, regardless of the prior distribution. For small number of agents, we propose the sequential unanimous mechanisms by extending the largest unanimous mechanisms from [Ohseto 2000]. We propose an automated mechanism design approach via evolutionary computation to optimize within the sequential unanimous mechanisms. We next study prior-free mechanism design. We propose the group-based optimal deadline mechanism and show that it is competitive against an undominated mechanism under minor technical assumptions.

翻译：我们研究可排他性公共项目模型，其中决策为二元选择（建设或不建设）。在经典的可排他性二元公共项目模型中，个体要么完全消费项目，要么被完全排除。我们研究的场景中，机制可为不同个体设置不同的项目释放时间，使得高支付个体能比低支付个体更早消费项目。这种延迟释放虽损害社会福利，但能激励个体支付以覆盖项目成本。机制设计目标是最小化所有个体的最大释放延迟与总释放延迟。我们首先考虑已知个体类型先验分布的场景，目标是最小化期望最大释放延迟和期望总释放延迟，并提出单截止期机制。研究表明，无论先验分布如何，最优单截止期机制对两个目标均具有渐近最优性。针对少量个体，我们通过扩展Ohseto（2000）的最大一致机制，提出序贯一致机制，并利用进化计算实现自动化机制设计以优化该机制。随后研究无先验机制设计，提出基于分组的截止期最优机制，证明在弱技术假设下该机制与无占优机制具有竞争性。