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Contribution Details

Type Conference or Workshop Paper
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Published in Proceedings Yes
Title The Power of Local Manipulation Strategies in Assignment Mechanisms
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Timo Mennle
  • Michael Weiss
  • Basil Philipp
  • Sven Seuken
Presentation Type paper
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
ISBN 978-1-57735-738-4
Page Range 82 - 89
Event Title Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Event Type conference
Event Location Buenos Aires, Argentina
Event Start Date July 25 - 2015
Event End Date July 31 - 2015
Series Name Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Number 24
Place of Publication Palo Alto, California, USA
Publisher AAAI Press / International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence
Abstract Text We consider three important, non-strategyproof assignment mechanisms: Probabilistic Serial and two variants of the Boston mechanism. Under each of these mechanisms, we study the agent’s manipulation problem of determining a best response, i.e., a report that maximizes the agent’s expected utility. In particular, we consider local manipulation strategies, which are simple heuristics based on local, greedy search. We make three main contributions. First, we present results from a behavioral experiment (conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk) which demonstrate that human manipulation strategies can largely be explained by local manipulation strategies. Second, we prove that local manipulation strategies may fail to solve the manipulation problem optimally. Third, we show via large-scale simulations that despite this nonoptimality, these strategies are very effective on average. Our results demonstrate that while the manipulation problem may be hard in general, even cognitively or computationally bounded (human) agents can find near-optimal solutions almost all the time via simple local search strategies.
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