Optimizing over Serial Dictatorships

Ioannis Caragiannis, Nidhi Rathi

Abstract: Motivated by the success of the serial dictatorship mechanism in social choice settings, we explore its usefulness in tackling various combinatorial optimization problems. We do so by considering an abstract model, in which a set of agents are asked to act in a particular ordering, called the action sequence. Each agent acts in a way that gives her the maximum possible value, given the actions of the agents who preceded her in the action sequence. Our goal is to compute action sequences that yield approximately optimal total value to the agents (a.k.a., social welfare). We assume query access to the value \(v_i(S)\) that the agent i gets when she acts after the agents in the ordered set S.