Charity Auctions on Social Networks

Arpita Ghosh, Mohammad Mahdian

A common way to encourage individuals to donate to charities is by offering to match their contribution (often by their employer or by the government). Conitzer and Sandholm introduced the idea of using auctions to allow individuals to offer to match the contribution of others. We explore this idea in a social network setting, where individuals care about the contribution of their neighbors, and are allowed to specify contributions that are conditional on the contribution of their neighbors. We give a mechanism for this setting that raises the largest individually rational contributions given the conditional bids, and analyze the equilibria of this mechanism in the case of linear utilities. We show that if the social network is strongly connected, the mechanism always has an equilibrium that raises the maximum total contribution (which is the contribution computed according to the true utilities), and characterize social networks for which a non-zero equilibrium exists in terms of the largest eigenvalue of the associated utility matrix.


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