We consider the one-sided matching problem, where n agents have preferences over n items, and these preferences are induced by underlying cardinal valuation functions. The goal is to match every agent to a single item so as to maximize the social welfare. Most of the related literature, however, assumes that the values of the agents are not a priori known, and only access to the ordinal preferences of the agents over the items is provided. Consequently, this incomplete information leads to loss of efficiency, which is measured by the notion of distortion. In this paper, we further assume that the agents can answer a small number of queries, allowing us partial access to their values. We study the interplay between elicited cardinal information (measured by the number of queries per agent) and distortion for one-sided matching, as well as a wide range of well-studied related problems. Qualitatively, our results show that with a limited number of queries, it is possible to obtain significant improvements over the classic setting, where only access to ordinal information is given.

中文翻译：

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一些查询大有帮助：匹配中的信息失真权衡

我们考虑单边匹配问题，其中 n 个代理对 n 个项目有偏好，而这些偏好是由潜在的基数估值函数引起的。目标是将每个代理与单个项目匹配，以最大化社会福利。然而，大多数相关文献都假设代理的价值不是先验已知的，并且只提供了对代理对项目的序数偏好的访问。因此，这种不完整的信息会导致效率的损失，这是通过失真的概念来衡量的。在本文中，我们进一步假设代理可以回答少量查询，从而允许我们部分访问它们的值。我们研究了引发的基本信息（通过每个代理的查询数量来衡量）与单边匹配失真之间的相互作用，以及广泛研究的相关问题。定性地，我们的结果表明，通过有限数量的查询，可以比经典设置获得显着改进，在经典设置中只提供对有序信息的访问。