Money Burning Mechanism Design: From Welfare to Surplus

Abstract

We settle the worst-case approximability of consumer-surplus maximization in general multidimensional mechanism-design environments. We do so through two black-box reductions from welfare maximization to the agents'total utility. Our first reduction turns exact welfare maximization into a prior-free, universally truthful and ex-post individually rational mechanism that preserves at least a $1/H_n$ fraction of optimal welfare as expected consumer surplus. The guarantee holds for $n$ agents with arbitrary nonnegative valuations over a finite outcome space, where $H_n$ is the $n$-th harmonic number. The factor $H_n$ is worst-case optimal, including its constant, even for a single-item auction with a known i.i.d. prior and Bayesian incentive compatibility. Our second reduction allows existing truthful welfare approximation mechanisms to be reused for surplus maximization. For valuation classes closed under scaling, it converts any ex-post individually rational, truthful $\alpha$-approximation for welfare with nonnegative payments into an $O(\alpha\log(n))$-approximation for surplus. Our sharp guarantee resolves the welfare-approximation aspect of the open question of Hartline and Roughgarden [2008] on the power of money burning beyond $k$-unit auctions, and the question of Ezra et al. [2025] concerning optimal surplus guarantees for broader valuation classes. It also replaces the outcome-dependent $O(\log|\mathcal{O}|)$ guarantee of Fotakis et al. [2015] with the tight agent-dependent factor $H_n$. These results yield polynomial-time mechanisms with the exact $H_n$ guarantee for gross-substitutes. They also give prior-free, universally truthful approximations of $O(H_n\log^2\log m)$ for XOS valuations and $O(H_n\log^3\log m)$ for subadditive valuations using demand and value queries, where $m$ is the number of items.