Abstract. A celebrated impossibility result by Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983) shows that any truthful mechanism for two-sided
markets that maximizes social welfare must run a deficit, resulting in a necessity to relax welfare efficiency and the use
of approximation mechanisms. Such mechanisms, in general, make extensive use of the Bayesian priors. In this work, we investigate
a question of increasing theoretical and practical importance: how much prior information is required to design mechanisms
with near-optimal approximations? Our first contribution is a more general impossibility result stating that no meaningful
approximation is possible without any prior information, expanding the famous impossibility result of Myerson and Satterthwaite.
Our second contribution is that one single sample (one number per item), arguably a minimum-possible amount of prior information,
from each seller distribution is sufficient for a large class of two-sided markets. We prove matching upper and lower bounds
on the best approximation that can be obtained with one single sample for subadditive buyers and additive sellers regardless
of computational considerations. Our third contribution is the design of computationally efficient black box reductions that
turn any one-sided mechanism into a two-sided mechanism with a small loss in the approximation, while using only one single
sample from each seller. On the way, our black box-type mechanisms deliver several interesting positive results in their own
right, often beating even the state of the art that uses full prior information.