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Black-Box Reductions in Mechanism Design

In their paper On the Impossibility of Black-Box Transformation in Mechanism Design (2011) [2], Chawla et al. prove some impossibility results about black-box mechanisms. I will give an overview of the problem, summarize prior work, summarize the results of this paper, go through some proofs, and offer additional commentary and open questions. In mechanism design, it is necessary to design a mechanism that will ask bidders for their bids (representing how they value different allocations) and then produce an allocation that satisfies some problem-specific feasibility constraint. Chawla et al. consider the following criteria to be necessary for all mechanisms: