{"ID":5552790,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-02T01:54:51.863792489Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-03T19:41:52.190318515Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00101","arxiv_id":"2607.00101","title":"From Welfare to Utility: Generalized Objectives in Budget-Feasible Procurement","abstract":"We study mechanism design for the budget-feasible procurement problem, a natural problem that arises when a buyer wants to procure goods or services from multiple strategic sellers who each have a cost to provide that service, the buyer has a value for each service procured, but is constrained by a budget. In contrast to prior work, which has focused on buyer value maximization for this problem, we solve for optimal and approximately-optimal mechanisms for the objectives of buyer utility (value of procured services minus payments), welfare (value minus production costs), and generalizations of the two. For welfare, we design a simple mechanism that obtains a constant-factor approximation for the prior-free (worst-case) setting. As prior-free mechanisms fail to provide any guarantee for utility, even for a single seller, we consider Bayesian settings, where the buyer has distributional knowledge over sellers' costs. We first provide a utility-optimal mechanism that satisfies the buyer's budget constraint in expectation, then we show how to modify the mechanism to satisfy the budget constraint ex-post, for every realization of seller costs, while still obtaining near-optimal utility guarantees. Finally, we generalize our mechanisms to other objectives.","short_abstract":"We study mechanism design for the budget-feasible procurement problem, a natural problem that arises when a buyer wants to procure goods or services from multiple strategic sellers who each have a cost to provide that service, the buyer has a value for each service procured, but is constrained by a budget. In contrast...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00101","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.00101v1","authors":"[\"Alon Eden\",\"Eldar Kerner\",\"Kira Goldner\",\"Thodoris Tsilivis\"]","published":"2026-06-30T19:41:58Z","proceeding":"cs.GT","tasks":"[\"cs.GT\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}