Single-minded agent

In computational economics, a single-minded agent is an agent who wants only a very specific combination of items. The valuation function of such an agent assigns a positive value only to a specific set of items, and to all sets that contain it. It assigns a zero value to all other sets. A single-minded agent regards the set of items he wants as purely complementary goods.

Various computational problems related to allocation of items are easier when all the agents are known to be single-minded. For example:

• Revenue-maximizing auctions.
• Multi-item exchange.
• Fair cake-cutting and fair item allocation.
• Combinatorial auctions.
• Envy-free pricing.