AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is a top conference in AI. The Thirty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-22) will take place in Vancouver. This year, the conference received a record 9,251 submissions, of which 9,020 were reviewed. Based on a thorough and rigorous review process, 1,349 papers have been accepted. This yields an overall acceptance rate of 15%. Our below submission was selected to present on the conference. Congratulations to all authors!

Title: Multi-Unit Auction in Social Networks with Budgets

Authors: Mingyu Xiao, Yuchao Song, Bakh Khoussainov

In this paper, we study multi-unit auctions in social networks, where each buyer has a fixed budget and can spread the sale information to the network neighbors. We design a mechanism encouraging buyers to report their valuations truthfully and spread the sale information. Our design uses the idea of the clinching mechanism to decide the transaction price and can be viewed as a network version of the mechanism. Most of the previous clinching mechanisms search for the transaction prices by increasing the current price. Our mechanism directly computes the transaction prices in polynomial time. Furthermore, the mechanism applies a technique to iteratively activate new buyers in the network. This ensures utility preservations of the buyers and benefits the seller. We prove key properties of our mechanism, such as no-positive-transfers, individual rationality, incentive compatibility, non-wastefulness and social welfare preservation.