Lottery Pricing Equilibria

We extend the notion of Combinatorial Walrasian Equilibrium, as defined by \citet{FGL13}, to settings with budgets. When agents have budgets, the maximum social welfare as traditionally defined is not a suitable benchmark since it is overly optimistic. This motivated the liquid welfare of \cite{DP14} as an alternative. Observing that no combinatorial Walrasian equilibrium guarantees a non-zero fraction of the maximum liquid welfare in the absence of randomization, we instead work with randomized allocations and extend the notions of liquid welfare and Combinatorial Walrasian Equilibrium accordingly. Our generalization of the Combinatorial Walrasian Equilibrium prices lotteries over bundles of items rather than bundles, and we term it a lottery pricing equilibrium.

Our results are two-fold. First, we exhibit an efficient algorithm which turns a randomized allocation with liquid expected welfare W into a lottery pricing equilibrium with liquid expected welfare 3-\sqrt{5}{2}\cdot W approx 0.3819\cdot W. Next, given access to a demand oracle and an alpha-approximate oblivious rounding algorithm for the configuration linear program for the welfare maximization problem, we show how to efficiently compute a randomized allocation which is (a) supported on polynomially-many deterministic allocations and (b) obtains [nearly] an alpha fraction of the optimal liquid expected welfare. In the case of subadditive valuations, combining both results yields an efficient algorithm which computes a lottery pricing equilibrium obtaining a constant fraction of the optimal liquid expected welfare.