Truthful unit-demand auctions with budgets revisited

We consider auctions of indivisible items to unit-demand bidders with budgets. This setting was suggested as an expressive model for single sponsored search auctions. Prior work presented mechanisms that compute bidder-optimal outcomes and are truthful for a restricted set of inputs, i.e., inputs in so-called general position. This condition is easily violated. We provide the first mechanism that is truthful in expectation for all inputs and achieves for each bidder no worse utility than the bidder-optimal outcome. Additionally we give a complete characterization for which inputs mechanisms that compute bidder-optimal outcomes are truthful.