Paper Detail
Aviad Rubinstein, Xizhi Tan, Zixin Zhou
A central challenge in mechanism design is to develop truthful trade mechanisms that maximize the expected gains-from-trade (GFT) in two-sided markets. Because achieving the full GFT is generally impossible, the literature has focused on constant-factor approximations---a notoriously difficult problem even in simple settings. It was only recently that a breakthrough result by [DMSW22] achieved a constant-factor approximation for single-item bilateral trade. The same guarantee was later extended to single-dimensional matching markets with general downward-closed constraints [BRTW26]. Most existing results, however, are limited to single-dimensional agents. A notable multi-dimensional exception is [CGMZ21]. They considered a market with one constrained-additive buyer and $n$ single-dimensional sellers and provided a mechanism that achieves a $\log^2(n)$ approximation to the second-best GFT, i.e., the maximum expected GFT theoretically achievable by any mechanism satisfying Bayesian Incentive Compatibility (BIC), Interim Individual Rationality (IIR), and ex-ante Weak Budget Balance (WBB). In this paper, we study multi-dimensional bilateral trade problem where both sides of the market are multi-dimensional. We start with one buyer with XOS valuation and one seller with an additive cost function. We then generalize to a market with $n$ XOS buyers and one additive seller. Assuming independent items' values and costs, in both settings we propose simple mechanisms that are BIC, IIR, and ex-ante WBB, while achieving a constant fraction of the optimal (first-best) expected GFT.
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@article{rubinstein2026approximately,
title = {Approximately Efficient Multidimensional Bilateral Trade},
author = {Aviad Rubinstein and Xizhi Tan and Zixin Zhou},
year = {2026},
abstract = {A central challenge in mechanism design is to develop truthful trade mechanisms that maximize the expected gains-from-trade (GFT) in two-sided markets. Because achieving the full GFT is generally impossible, the literature has focused on constant-factor approximations---a notoriously difficult problem even in simple settings. It was only recently that a breakthrough result by [DMSW22] achieved a constant-factor approximation for single-item bilateral trade. The same guarantee was later extended },
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02872},
keywords = {cs.GT},
eprint = {2609.02872},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}