Reproduce “Expressive mechanisms for equitable rent division on a budget” on OpenResearch
Turn your favorite coding agents into research agents that review literature, develop hypotheses, and run experiments.
Universal app for Apple silicon and Intel. Requires macOS 11 or later.
About this paper
Rodrigo A. Velez
This paper extends fair rent division mechanisms to account for financially constrained roommates by introducing 'budget-constrained quasi-linear preferences' that incorporate soft budget limits. It demonstrates that robust incentive compatibility is preserved if and only if the reported penalties for exceeding budgets are bounded, allowing for more expressive yet strategically sound allocation processes.
Key insights
- Allowing agents to report arbitrarily high penalties for exceeding their budget (unbounded expressiveness) leads to strategic manipulation, resulting in outcomes that are not truly envy-free or Pareto efficient.
- Bounding the reported budget violation penalties (bounded expressiveness) restores desirable incentive properties, ensuring that stable outcomes align with truly envy-free allocations.
- The research highlights a fundamental tension between enabling richer preference expression and maintaining robust strategic properties in mechanism design, emphasizing the importance of carefully designed preference domains.
Summary by alphaXiv.
Tip: change arxiv.org to autoarxiv.org in any arXiv abstract link to open the paper here.