Improved Truthful Mechanisms for Combinatorial Auctions with Submodular Bidders

Abstract: A longstanding open problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design is to design computationally-efficient truthful mechanisms for (approximately) maximizing welfare in combinatorial auctions with submodular bidders. The first such mechanism was obtained by Dobzinski, Nisan, and Schapira [STOC'06] who gave an $O(\log<sup>2{m})$-approximation where $m$ is the number of items. This problem has been studied extensively since, culminating in an $O(\sqrt{\log{m}})$-approximation mechanism by Dobzinski [STOC'16]. We present a computationally-efficient truthful mechanism with approximation ratio that improves upon the state-of-the-art by an exponential factor. In particular, our mechanism achieves an $O((\log\log{m})<sup>3)$-approximation in expectation, uses only $O(n)$ demand queries, and has universal truthfulness guarantee. This settles an open question of Dobzinski on whether $\Theta(\sqrt{\log{m}})$ is the best approximation ratio in this setting in negative.