Differentiable Economics for Randomized Affine Maximizer Auctions

Differentiable Economics for Randomized Affine Maximizer Auctions

Michael Curry, Tuomas Sandholm, John Dickerson

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2633-2641. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/293

A recent approach to automated mechanism design, differentiable economics, represents auctions by rich function approximators and optimizes their performance by gradient descent. The ideal auction architecture for differentiable economics would be perfectly strategyproof, support multiple bidders and items, and be rich enough to represent the optimal (i.e. revenue-maximizing) mechanism. So far, such an architecture does not exist. There are single-bidder approaches (MenuNet, RochetNet) which are always strategyproof and can represent optimal mechanisms. RegretNet is multi-bidder and can approximate any mechanism, but is only approximately strategyproof. We present an architecture that supports multiple bidders and is perfectly strategyproof, but cannot necessarily represent the optimal mechanism. This architecture is the classic affine maximizer auction (AMA), modified to offer lotteries. By using the gradient-based optimization tools of differentiable economics, we can now train lottery AMAs, competing with or outperforming prior approaches in revenue.
Keywords:
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Mechanism design
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Auctions and market-based systems
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: MDA: Economics