{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Bayesian Auctions with Efficient Queries (Extended Abstract)","authors":[{"name":"Jing Chen","slug":"jing-chen","given":"Jing","family":"Chen","affiliation":"Department of Computer Science , Stony Brook University"},{"name":"Bo Li","slug":"bo-li","given":"Bo","family":"Li","affiliation":"Department of Computing , The Hong Kong Polytechnic University"},{"name":"Yingkai Li","slug":"yingkai-li","given":"Yingkai","family":"Li","affiliation":"Department of Computer Science , Northwestern University"},{"name":"Pinyan Lu","slug":"pinyan-lu","given":"Pinyan","family":"Lu","affiliation":"Institute for Theoretical Computer Science , Shanghai University of Finance and Economics"}],"abstract":"Designing dominant-strategy incentive compatible (DSIC) mechanisms for a seller to generate (approximately) optimal revenue by selling items to players is a fundamental problem in Bayesian mechanism design. However, most existing studies assume that the seller knows the entire distribution from which the players’ values are drawn. Unfortunately, this assumption may not hold in reality: for example, when the distributions have exponentially large supports or do not have succinct representations. In this work we consider, for the first time, the query complexityof Bayesian mechanisms. The seller only has limited oracle accesses to the players’ distributions, via quantile queriesand value queries. For single-item auctions, we design mechanisms with logarithmicnumber of value or quantile queries which achieve almost optimal revenue. We then prove logarithmic lower-bounds, i.e., logarithmic number of queries are necessary for any constant approximation DSIC mechanisms, even when randomized and adaptive queries are allowed. Thus our mechanisms are almost optimal regarding query complexity. Our lower-bounds can be extended to multi-item auctions with monotone subadditive valuations, and we complement this part with constant approximation mechanisms for unit-demand or additive valuation functions. Our results are robust even if the answers to the queries contain noises.","doi":"10.24963/ijcai.2022/795","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2022/795","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2022/0795.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2022/795.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2022/bibtex/795","volume":{"slug":"2022","title":"Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2022","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2022/","year":2022,"location":"Vienna","dates":"23-29 July 2022","editors":"Luc De Raedt","isbn":"978-1-956792-00-3","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization","doi_prefix":"10.24963/ijcai.2022"},"section":"Journal Track","track":"Journal Track","number":795,"pages":{"first":5708,"last":5712},"keywords":["Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Economic Paradigms, Auctions and Market-Based Systems","Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Mechanism Design","Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Algorithmic Game Theory"],"videos":[{"label":"Video #1","url":"https://slideslive.com/38987231","length_sec":88,"provider":"slideslive"},{"label":"Video #2","url":"https://slideslive.com/38985374","length_sec":721,"provider":"slideslive"}],"references":[{"position":1,"raw":"[Allouah and Besbes, 2019] Amine Allouah and Omar Bes- bes. 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