Efficient Money Burning in General Domains

Abstract

We study mechanism design where the objective is to maximize the residual surplus, i.e., the total value of the outcome minus the payments charged to the agents, by truthful mechanisms. The motivation comes from applications where the payments charged are not in the form of actual monetary transfers, but take the form of wasted resources. We consider a general mechanism design setting with m discrete outcomes and n multidimensional agents. We present two randomized truthful mechanisms that extract an O(logm) fraction of the maximum social surplus as residual surplus. The first mechanism achieves an O(logm)-approximation to the social surplus, which is improved to an O(1)-approximation by the second mechanism. An interesting feature of the second mechanism is that it optimizes over an appropriately restricted space of probability distributions, thus achieving an efficient tradeoff between social surplus and the total amount of payments charged to the agents.