{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,6,19]],"date-time":"2025-06-19T04:15:46Z","timestamp":1750306546499,"version":"3.41.0"},"reference-count":21,"publisher":"Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)","issue":"2","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2015,4,20]],"date-time":"2015-04-20T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1429488000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/www.acm.org\/publications\/policies\/copyright_policy#Background"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/100000001","name":"National Science Foundation","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["CCF-0830494"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["CCF-0830494"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/100000001","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/100000001","name":"NSF","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["CC-0964033"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["CC-0964033"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/100000001","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":["dl.acm.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["ACM Trans. Econ. Comput."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2015,4,20]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>Truthfulness is fragile and demanding. It is oftentimes harder to guarantee truthfulness when solving a problem than it is to solve the problem itself. Even worse, truthfulness can be utterly destroyed by small uncertainties in a mechanism\u2019s outcome. One obstacle is that truthful payments depend on outcomes other than the one realized, such as the lengths of non-shortest-paths in a shortest-path auction. Single-call mechanisms are a powerful tool that circumvents this obstacle: they implicitly charge truthful payments, guaranteeing truthfulness in expectation using only the outcome realized by the mechanism. The cost of such truthfulness is a trade-off between the expected quality of the outcome and the risk of large payments.<\/jats:p>\n          <jats:p>We study two of the most general domains for truthful mechanisms and largely settle when and to what extent single-call mechanisms are possible. The first single-call construction was discovered by Babaioff et al. [2010] in single-parameter domains. They give a transformation that turns any monotone, single-parameter allocation rule into a truthful-in-expectation single-call mechanism. Our first result is a natural complement to Babaioff et al. [2010]: we give a new transformation that produces a single-call VCG mechanism from any allocation rule for which VCG payments are truthful. Second, in both the single-parameter and VCG settings, we precisely characterize the possible transformations, showing that a wide variety of transformations are possible but that all take a very simple form. Finally, we study the inherent trade-off between the expected quality of the outcome and the risk of large payments. We show that our construction and that of Babaioff et al. [2010] simultaneously optimize a variety of metrics in their respective domains.<\/jats:p>\n          <jats:p>Our study is motivated by settings where uncertainty in a mechanism renders other known techniques untruthful, and we offer a variety of examples where such uncertainty can arise. In particular, we analyze pay-per-click advertising auctions, where the truthfulness of the standard VCG-based auction is easily broken when the auctioneer\u2019s estimated click-through-rates are imprecise.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/2741027","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2015,4,22]],"date-time":"2015-04-22T13:57:35Z","timestamp":1429711055000},"page":"1-60","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Single-Call Mechanisms"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"3","author":[{"given":"Christopher A.","family":"Wilkens","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"University of California Berkeley"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Balasubramanian","family":"Sivan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Wisconsin, Madison"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2015,4,20]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_1_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.5555\/874063.875583"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_2_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1086\/319558"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_3_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1386790.1386807"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_4_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2482540.2482602"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_5_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1807342.1807349"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_6_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1566374.1566386"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_7_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2090236.2090240"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_8_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1566374.1566388"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_9_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/FOCS.2009.42"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_10_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/FOCS.2010.79"},{"volume-title":"InProceedings of the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS\u201901)","author":"Hershberger J.","key":"e_1_2_1_11_1"},{"volume-title":"Proceedings of the 43rd Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS\u201902)","year":"2002","author":"Hershberger John","key":"e_1_2_1_12_1"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_13_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/1186810.1186815"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_14_1","unstructured":"David Jabas. 2010. Private communication.  David Jabas. 2010. Private communication."},{"volume-title":"Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence.","year":"2010","author":"Lahaie S\u00e9bastien","key":"e_1_2_1_15_1"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_16_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1287\/moor.6.1.58"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_17_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1006\/game.1999.0790"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_18_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.5555\/1622606.1622608"},{"volume-title":"Aggretaionand Revelation of Preferences, J.-J","author":"Roberts Kevin","key":"e_1_2_1_19_1"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_20_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1057\/jors.1974.72"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_21_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1257\/aer.99.2.430"}],"container-title":["ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/10.1145\/2741027","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/pdf\/10.1145\/2741027","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,6,18]],"date-time":"2025-06-18T06:12:37Z","timestamp":1750227157000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/10.1145\/2741027"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2015,4,20]]},"references-count":21,"journal-issue":{"issue":"2","published-print":{"date-parts":[[2015,4,20]]}},"alternative-id":["10.1145\/2741027"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/2741027","relation":{},"ISSN":["2167-8375","2167-8383"],"issn-type":[{"type":"print","value":"2167-8375"},{"type":"electronic","value":"2167-8383"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2015,4,20]]},"assertion":[{"value":"2013-03-01","order":0,"name":"received","label":"Received","group":{"name":"publication_history","label":"Publication History"}},{"value":"2014-05-01","order":1,"name":"accepted","label":"Accepted","group":{"name":"publication_history","label":"Publication History"}},{"value":"2015-04-20","order":2,"name":"published","label":"Published","group":{"name":"publication_history","label":"Publication History"}}]}}