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A tractable multiple agents protocol and algorithm for resource allocation under price rigidities

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Abstract

In many resource allocation problems, economy efficiency must be taken into consideration together with social equality, and price rigidities are often made according to some economic and social needs. We investigate the computational issues of dynamic mechanisms for selling multiple indivisible objects under price rigidities. We propose a multiple agents protocol and algorithm with polynomial time complexity that can achieve the over-demanded sets of items, and then introduce a dynamic mechanism with rationing to discover constrainedWalrasian equilibria under price rigidities in polynomial time. We also address the computation of buyers’ expected profits and items’ expected prices, and discuss strategical issues in the sense of expected profits.

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Notes

  1. Note that since upper bound prices are often set for the sake of equality between social members (who have some but limited pay ability), they generally accompany a limit to the number of resources one member can get.

  2. Suppose there are k buyers drawing lots for the right to buy item a. Then the lot is fair if each one of these buyers has 1/k chance of winning the lot.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported partly by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61105039,61173035,61472058), and the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (Grant No. NCET-11-0861).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Science and Technology, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, 116026, China

    Wei Huang, Hongbo Liu & Guangyao Dai

  2. Institute for Neural Computation, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0559, USA

    Hongbo Liu

  3. Machine Intelligence Research Labs, Auburn, WA, 98071, USA

    Ajith Abraham

Authors
  1. Wei Huang
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  2. Hongbo Liu
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  3. Guangyao Dai
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  4. Ajith Abraham
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Correspondence to Hongbo Liu.

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Huang, W., Liu, H., Dai, G. et al. A tractable multiple agents protocol and algorithm for resource allocation under price rigidities. Appl Intell 43, 564–577 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-015-0663-0

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