Mechanisms for allocating a divisible resource among strategic agents have been widely studied. The prominent paradigm is the proportional (Kelly) mechanism, which elicits a scalar bid per agent, allocates the resource proportionally, and charges payments equal to the bids. Follow-up mechanisms improve social welfare, but sacrifice simplicity by introducing complex allocation rules or unintuitive payments. We introduce a unified framework for designing simple resource allocation mechanisms with proportional-style allocations and uniform pricing. Our framework yields a family of mechanisms that interpolate between the Kelly mechanism and the first-price auction. These mechanisms strictly improve upon Kelly's efficiency guarantees, even achieving full efficiency in equilibrium, while also providing revenue guarantees relative to the VCG mechanism.
翻译:在战略型主体之间进行可分割资源分配的机制已被广泛研究。其中突出的范式是比例(Kelly)机制,该机制向每个主体收取标量出价,按比例分配资源,并收取等于出价的费用。后续机制虽提高了社会福利,但通过引入复杂的分配规则或非直观的定价方式牺牲了简洁性。本文提出了一种用于设计具有比例式分配和统一定价的简洁资源分配机制的通用框架。该框架产生了一组在Kelly机制与第一价格拍卖之间进行插值的机制族。这些机制显著改进了Kelly的效率保证,甚至在均衡状态下实现了完全效率,同时还提供了相对于VCG机制的收益保证。