A Prior-independent mechanism (PIM) is a mechanism in which the designer knows that the agents' valuations are drawn from some probability distribution, but does not know the distribution.
A typical application is a seller who wants to sell some items to potential buyers. The seller wants to price the items in a way that will maximize his profit. The optimal prices depend on the amount that each buyer is willing to pay for each item. The seller does not know these values, but he assumes that the values are random variables with some unknown probability distribution.
A PIM usually involves a random sampling process. The seller samples some valuations from the unknown distribution, and based on the samples, constructs an auction that yields approximately-optimal profits. The major research question in PIM design is: what is the sample complexity of the mechanism? I.e, how many agents it needs to sample in order to attain a reasonable approximation of the optimal welfare?
Devanur et al study a market with different item types and unit demand agents.[5]
Chawla et al study PIMs for the makespan minimization problem.[6]
Hsu et al study a market with different item types. The supplies are fixed. The buyers can buy bundles of items, and have different valuations on bundles. They prove that, if buyers are sampled independently from some unknown distribution, an optimal price-vector is calculated, and this price-vector is then applied to a fresh sample of buyers, then the social welfare is approximately optimal. The competitive ratio implied by their Theorem 6.3 is, with probability , at least
- .[7]
Prior-independent mechanisms (PIM) should be contrasted with two other mechanism types:
- Bayesian-optimal mechanisms (BOM) assume that the agents' valuations are drawn from a known probability distribution. The mechanism is tailored to the parameters of this distribution (e.g., its median or mean value).
- Prior-free mechanisms (PFM) do not assume that the agents' valuations are drawn from any probability distribution (known or unknown). The seller's goal is to design an auction that will produce a reasonable profit even in worst-case scenarios.
From the point-of-view of the designer, BOM is the easiest, then PIM, then PFM. The approximation guarantees of BOM and PIM are in expectation, while those of PFM are in worst-case.