336 research outputs found
Fair Payments for Efficient Allocations in Public Sector Combinatorial Auctions
Motivated by the increasing use of auctions by government
agencies, we consider the problem of fairly pricing public goods in a combinatorial
auction. A well-known problem with the incentive-compatible Vickrey-Clarke-Groves
(VCG) auction mechanism is that the resulting prices may not be in the core. Loosely
speaking, this means the payments of the winners could be so low, that there are losing
bidders who would have been willing to pay more than the payments of the winning bidders.
Clearly, this ``unfair\u27\u27 outcome is unacceptable for a public-sector auction. Proxy-based
combinatorial auctions,
in which each bidder submits several package bids to a proxy, result in efficient outcomes
and bidder-Pareto-optimal core-payments by winners, thus offering a viable practical alternative
to address this problem.
This paper confronts two critical issues facing the proxy-auction. First, motivated to
minimize a bidder\u27s ability to benefit through strategic manipulation (through collusive
agreement or unilateral action), we demonstrate the strength of a mechanism that minimizes
total payments among all possible proxy auction outcomes, narrowing the previously broad
solution concept. Secondly, we address the computational difficulties of achieving these outcomes
with a constraint-generation approach, promising to broaden the range of applications for which the
proxy-auction achieves a comfortably rapid solution
Combinatorial auctions for electronic business
Combinatorial auctions (CAs) have recently generated significant interest as an automated mechanism for buying and selling bundles of goods. They are proving to be extremely useful in numerous e-business applications such as e-selling, e-procurement, e-logistics, and B2B exchanges. In this article, we introduce combinatorial auctions and bring out important issues in the design of combinatorial auctions. We also highlight important contributions in current research in this area. This survey emphasizes combinatorial auctions as applied to electronic business situations
Efficiency Resource Allocation for Device-to-Device Underlay Communication Systems: A Reverse Iterative Combinatorial Auction Based Approach
Peer-to-peer communication has been recently considered as a popular issue
for local area services. An innovative resource allocation scheme is proposed
to improve the performance of mobile peer-to-peer, i.e., device-to-device
(D2D), communications as an underlay in the downlink (DL) cellular networks. To
optimize the system sum rate over the resource sharing of both D2D and cellular
modes, we introduce a reverse iterative combinatorial auction as the allocation
mechanism. In the auction, all the spectrum resources are considered as a set
of resource units, which as bidders compete to obtain business while the
packages of the D2D pairs are auctioned off as goods in each auction round. We
first formulate the valuation of each resource unit, as a basis of the proposed
auction. And then a detailed non-monotonic descending price auction algorithm
is explained depending on the utility function that accounts for the channel
gain from D2D and the costs for the system. Further, we prove that the proposed
auction-based scheme is cheat-proof, and converges in a finite number of
iteration rounds. We explain non-monotonicity in the price update process and
show lower complexity compared to a traditional combinatorial allocation. The
simulation results demonstrate that the algorithm efficiently leads to a good
performance on the system sum rate.Comment: 26 pages, 6 fgures; IEEE Journals on Selected Areas in
Communications, 201
Computational Mechanism Design: A Call to Arms
Game theory has developed powerful tools for analyzing decision making in systems with multiple autonomous actors. These tools, when tailored to computational settings, provide a foundation for building multiagent software systems. This tailoring gives rise to the field of computational mechanism design, which applies economic principles to computer systems design
Auctions and bidding: A guide for computer scientists
There is a veritable menagerie of auctions-single-dimensional, multi-dimensional, single-sided, double-sided, first-price, second-price, English, Dutch, Japanese, sealed-bid-and these have been extensively discussed and analyzed in the economics literature. The main purpose of this article is to survey this literature from a computer science perspective, primarily from the viewpoint of computer scientists who are interested in learning about auction theory, and to provide pointers into the economics literature for those who want a deeper technical understanding. In addition, since auctions are an increasingly important topic in computer science, we also look at work on auctions from the computer science literature. Overall, our aim is to identifying what both these bodies of work these tell us about creating electronic auctions. © 2011 ACM.This work was funded in part by HP under the “Always on” grant, by NSF IIS-0329037 “Tools and Techniques for Automated Mechanism Design”, and by IEA (TIN2006-15662-C02-01), OK (IST-4-027253-STP), eREP(EC-FP6-CIT5-28575) and Agreement Technologies (CONSOLIDER CSD2007-0022, INGENIO 2010).Peer Reviewe
An Agent Based Market Design Methodology for Combinatorial Auctions
Auction mechanisms have attracted a great deal of interest and have been used in diverse e-marketplaces. In particular, combinatorial auctions have the potential to play an important role in electronic transactions. Therefore, diverse combinatorial auction market types have been proposed to satisfy market needs. These combinatorial auction types have diverse market characteristics, which require an effective market design approach. This study proposes a comprehensive and systematic market design methodology for combinatorial auctions based on three phases: market architecture design, auction rule design, and winner determination design. A market architecture design is for designing market architecture types by Backward Chain Reasoning. Auction rules design is to design transaction rules for auctions. The specific auction process type is identified by the Backward Chain Reasoning process. Winner determination design is about determining the decision model for selecting optimal bids and auctioneers. Optimization models are identified by Forward Chain Reasoning. Also, we propose an agent based combinatorial auction market design system using Backward and Forward Chain Reasoning. Then we illustrate a design process for the general n-bilateral combinatorial auction market. This study serves as a guideline for practical implementation of combinatorial auction markets design.Combinatorial Auction, Market Design Methodology, Market Architecture Design, Auction Rule Design, Winner Determination Design, Agent-Based System
Bundling Equilibrium in Combinatorial auctions
This paper analyzes individually-rational ex post equilibrium in the VC
(Vickrey-Clarke) combinatorial auctions. If is a family of bundles of
goods, the organizer may restrict the participants by requiring them to submit
their bids only for bundles in . The -VC combinatorial auctions
(multi-good auctions) obtained in this way are known to be
individually-rational truth-telling mechanisms. In contrast, this paper deals
with non-restricted VC auctions, in which the buyers restrict themselves to
bids on bundles in , because it is rational for them to do so. That is,
it may be that when the buyers report their valuation of the bundles in
, they are in an equilibrium. We fully characterize those that
induce individually rational equilibrium in every VC auction, and we refer to
the associated equilibrium as a bundling equilibrium. The number of bundles in
represents the communication complexity of the equilibrium. A special
case of bundling equilibrium is partition-based equilibrium, in which
is a field, that is, it is generated by a partition. We analyze the tradeoff
between communication complexity and economic efficiency of bundling
equilibrium, focusing in particular on partition-based equilibrium
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