\begin{itemize} \item already existing field of experiment design: survey-like setup, what are the best points to include in your experiment? Measure of the usefulness of the data: variance-reduction or entropy-reduction. \item nowadays, there is also a big focus on purchasing data: paid surveys, mechanical turk, etc. that add economic aspects to the problem of experiment design \item recent advances (Singer, Chen) in the field of budgeted mechanisms \item we study ridge regression, very widely used in statistical learning, and treat it as a problem of budgeted experiment design \item we make the following contributions: ... \item extension to a more general setup which includes a wider class of machine learning problems \end{itemize} \subsection{Related work} Two types of mechanisms: \emph{deterministic} and \emph{randomized}. For randomized mechanisms, people seek \emph{universally truthful} mechanisms: mechanisms which are a randomization of truthful mechanisms. \paragraph{Symmetric submodular functions} $V(S) = g(|S|)$ where $g$ is a concave function. Truthful deterministic mechanism with approximation ratio of 2. This is optimal \cite{singer-mechanisms}. \paragraph{Knapsack} deterministic: $1+\sqrt{2}\leq \alpha \leq 2 + \sqrt{2}$, randomized: $2\leq \alpha\leq 3$ \cite{chen} \paragraph{Matching} deterministic: $2 \leq \alpha\leq 7.32$ \cite{singer-mechanisms} \paragraph{Coverage} deterministic: $ ?\leq\alpha\leq 31$ \cite{singer-influence} \paragraph{Submodular function} deterministic: $1+\sqrt{2}\leq\alpha\leq ?$, randomized: $2\leq\alpha\leq 7.91$ \cite{chen} For wider class of functions, \cite{singer-mechanisms} proves that even for XOS functions, the lower bound is $\sqrt{n}$ (no constant approximation) even in the non-strategic case). To be able to say something interesting, people extend the computational model to the \emph{demand} query model: you have access to an oracle which given a vector of price $[p_i]_{i\in\mathcal{N}}$ returns $S\in\argmax_{S\subseteq\mathcal{N}} V(S) - \sum_{i\in S} p_i$ \paragraph{XOS functions} fractionally additive functions: functions which can be written as the max of a finite set of additive functions. deterministic: 768 \paragraph{Complement-free (sub-additive) objective} derministic: $O(\log^3 n)$ \cite{dobz2011-mechanisms}. randomized: $O(\frac{\log n}{\log \log n})$ \cite{bei2012budget}. More generally \cite{bei2012budget} gives a randomized mechanism which is $O(\mathcal{I})$ where $\mathcal{I}$ is the integrality gap of a set cover like problem which is defined from the value function. In particular, for XOS function, this integrality gap is $O(1)$. \paragraph{Bayesian mechanism design} when we have a distribution over the costs of the agents. In this case the approximation guarantee is defined in expectations. \cite{bei2012budget} $768/512$ approximation ratio for any subadditive function. \paragraph{Online mechanisms} \cite{learning} in the i.i.d posted price model for symmetric submodular functions randomized $O(1)$-competitive algorithm. For general submodular function in the secretary posted price model randomized $O(\log n)$-competitive algorithm. In the bidding model $O(1)$-competitive algorithm. \stratis{What is known about the maximization of logdet in the non-strategic case? Is it NP hard? Approximation ratios?} \thibaut{Knapsack reduces to our problem in dimension 1, hence maximizing log det is NP-hard. The approximation ratio is at least (1-1/e) by applying the general approximation algorithm from Sviridenko \cite{sviridenko-submodular}.}