Efficient and effective budget-feasible mechanisms for submodular valuations

Kai Han, Haotian Zhang, Shuang Cui

Abstract: We revisit the classical problem of designing Budget-Feasible Mechanisms (BFMs) for submodular valuation functions, which has been extensively studied since the seminal paper of Singer [FOCS'10] due to their wide applications in crowdsourcing and social marketing. We propose TripleEagle, a novel algorithmic framework for designing BFMs, based on which we present several simple yet effective BFMs that achieve better approximation ratios than the state-of-the-art work. Moreover, our BFMs are the first in the literature to achieve linear query complexity under the value oracle model while ensuring obvious strategyproofness, making them more practical than the previous BFMs. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the empirical performance of our BFMs, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiorities of our approach in terms of efficiency and effectiveness compared to the state-of-the-art BFMs.