998 research outputs found
On the Efficiency of the Walrasian Mechanism
Central results in economics guarantee the existence of efficient equilibria
for various classes of markets. An underlying assumption in early work is that
agents are price-takers, i.e., agents honestly report their true demand in
response to prices. A line of research in economics, initiated by Hurwicz
(1972), is devoted to understanding how such markets perform when agents are
strategic about their demands. This is captured by the \emph{Walrasian
Mechanism} that proceeds by collecting reported demands, finding clearing
prices in the \emph{reported} market via an ascending price t\^{a}tonnement
procedure, and returns the resulting allocation. Similar mechanisms are used,
for example, in the daily opening of the New York Stock Exchange and the call
market for copper and gold in London.
In practice, it is commonly observed that agents in such markets reduce their
demand leading to behaviors resembling bargaining and to inefficient outcomes.
We ask how inefficient the equilibria can be. Our main result is that the
welfare of every pure Nash equilibrium of the Walrasian mechanism is at least
one quarter of the optimal welfare, when players have gross substitute
valuations and do not overbid. Previous analysis of the Walrasian mechanism
have resorted to large market assumptions to show convergence to efficiency in
the limit. Our result shows that approximate efficiency is guaranteed
regardless of the size of the market
Coalition Formation and Combinatorial Auctions; Applications to Self-organization and Self-management in Utility Computing
In this paper we propose a two-stage protocol for resource management in a
hierarchically organized cloud. The first stage exploits spatial locality for
the formation of coalitions of supply agents; the second stage, a combinatorial
auction, is based on a modified proxy-based clock algorithm and has two phases,
a clock phase and a proxy phase. The clock phase supports price discovery; in
the second phase a proxy conducts multiple rounds of a combinatorial auction
for the package of services requested by each client. The protocol strikes a
balance between low-cost services for cloud clients and a decent profit for the
service providers. We also report the results of an empirical investigation of
the combinatorial auction stage of the protocol.Comment: 14 page
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