Taking the Lab to the Field: Experimental Tests of Alternative Mechanisms to Procure Multiple Contracts

The first part of the paper reports the results from a sequence of laboratory experiments comparing the bidding behavior for multiple contracts in three different sealed bid auction mechanisms; first-price simultaneous, first-price sequential and first-price combinatorial bidding. The design of the experiment is based on experiences from a public procurement auction of road markings in Sweden. Bidders are asymmetric in their cost functions; some exhibit decreasing average costs of winning more than one contract, whereas other bidders have increasing average cost functions. The combinatorial bidding mechanism is demonstrated to be most efficient. The second part of the paper describes how the lab experiment was followed up by a field test of a combinatorial procurement auction of road markings.Multiple units, non-constant costs, asymmetric redemption values, alternative procurement mechanisms

Online Auctions

The economic literature on online auctions is rapidly growing because of the enormous amount of freely available field data. Moreover, numerous innovations in auction-design features on platforms such as eBay have created excellent research opportunities. In this article, we survey the theoretical, empirical, and experimental research on bidder strategies (including the timing of bids and winner's-curse effects) and seller strategies (including reserve-price policies and the use of buy-now options) in online auctions, as well as some of the literature dealing with online-auction design (including stopping rules and multi-object pricing rules).

Online Auctions with Dual-Threshold Algorithms: An Experimental Study and Practical Evaluation

Online auctions are a viable alternative to conventional posted price mechanisms. Agrawal, Wang, and Ye [1] have proposed two primal-dual algorithms for revenue-maximizing multi-item allocation tasks. Although promising in terms of theoretical properties and competitive ratios, there is alack of evidence regarding the real-world practicability of these mechanisms, for instance referring to online auction-based tickets sales. In this paper, we conduct an experimental study on both the One-Time Learning Algorithm(OLA) and the Dynamic Learning Algorithm (DLA) based on synthetic data, revealing the remarkable aptitude of the latter for non-trivial online auctions. Being robust to most input variations, the inherent dynamic update of dual thresholds achieves a superior balance with respect to the trade-off between objective function values and runtimes. We address critical sensitivities quantitatively and draft several small extensions by incorporating input distribution knowledge

Prophet Secretary for Combinatorial Auctions and Matroids

The secretary and the prophet inequality problems are central to the field of Stopping Theory. Recently, there has been a lot of work in generalizing these models to multiple items because of their applications in mechanism design. The most important of these generalizations are to matroids and to combinatorial auctions (extends bipartite matching). Kleinberg-Weinberg \cite{KW-STOC12} and Feldman et al. \cite{feldman2015combinatorial} show that for adversarial arrival order of random variables the optimal prophet inequalities give a $1/2$-approximation. For many settings, however, it's conceivable that the arrival order is chosen uniformly at random, akin to the secretary problem. For such a random arrival model, we improve upon the $1/2$-approximation and obtain $(1-1/e)$-approximation prophet inequalities for both matroids and combinatorial auctions. This also gives improvements to the results of Yan \cite{yan2011mechanism} and Esfandiari et al. \cite{esfandiari2015prophet} who worked in the special cases where we can fully control the arrival order or when there is only a single item. Our techniques are threshold based. We convert our discrete problem into a continuous setting and then give a generic template on how to dynamically adjust these thresholds to lower bound the expected total welfare.Comment: Preliminary version appeared in SODA 2018. This version improves the writeup on Fixed-Threshold algorithm

Essays In Algorithmic Market Design Under Social Constraints

Rapid technological advances over the past few decades---in particular, the rise of the internet---has significantly reshaped and expanded the meaning of our everyday social activities, including our interactions with our social circle, the media, and our political and economic activities This dissertation aims to tackle some of the unique societal challenges underlying the design of automated online platforms that interact with people and organizations---namely, those imposed by legal, ethical, and strategic considerations. I narrow down attention to fairness considerations, learning with repeated trials, and competition for market share. In each case, I investigate the broad issue in a particular context (i.e. online market), and present the solution my research offers to the problem in that application. Addressing interdisciplinary problems, such as the ones in this dissertation, requires drawing ideas and techniques from various disciplines, including theoretical computer science, microeconomics, and applied statistics. The research presented here utilizes a combination of theoretical and data analysis tools to shed light on some of the key challenges in designing algorithms for today\u27s online markets, including crowdsourcing and labor markets, online advertising, and social networks among others

The Role of Auctions in Allocating Public Resources

This paper provides an economic framework within which to consider the effectiveness and limitations of auction markets. The paper looks at the use of auctions as a policy instrument and the effects of auction design on consumer interests, the efficient allocation of resources, and industry competitiveness.Australia; Research; Ascending-bid auction; Auctions; Bidders; Conservation funds; Descending-bid auction; Dutch auction; English auction; Environmental Management; First-price sealed-bid auction; Infrastructure; Markets; Oral auction; Outcry auction; Pollutant emission permits; Power supply contracts; Public resources; Radio- spectrum; Second-price sealed-bid auction Spectrum licences; Vickrey auction; Water rights;