A dominant strategy, double clock auction with estimation-based tatonnement

The price mechanism is fundamental to economics but difficult to reconcile with incentive compatibility and individual rationality. We introduce a double clock auction for a homogeneous good market with multidimensional private information and multiunit traders that is deficit‐free, ex post individually rational, constrained efficient, and makes sincere bidding a dominant strategy equilibrium. Under a weak dependence and an identifiability condition, our double clock auction is also asymptotically efficient. Asymptotic efficiency is achieved by estimating demand and supply using information from the bids of traders that have dropped out and following a tâtonnement process that adjusts the clock prices based on the estimates

Double Auctions in Markets for Multiple Kinds of Goods

Motivated by applications such as stock exchanges and spectrum auctions, there is a growing interest in mechanisms for arranging trade in two-sided markets. Existing mechanisms are either not truthful, or do not guarantee an asymptotically-optimal gain-from-trade, or rely on a prior on the traders' valuations, or operate in limited settings such as a single kind of good. We extend the random market-halving technique used in earlier works to markets with multiple kinds of goods, where traders have gross-substitute valuations. We present MIDA: a Multi Item-kind Double-Auction mechanism. It is prior-free, truthful, strongly-budget-balanced, and guarantees near-optimal gain from trade when market sizes of all goods grow to $\infty$ at a similar rate.Comment: Full version of IJCAI-18 paper, with 2 figures. Previous names: "MIDA: A Multi Item-type Double-Auction Mechanism", "A Random-Sampling Double-Auction Mechanism". 10 page

FlexAuc: Serving Dynamic Demands in a Spectrum Trading Market with Flexible Auction

In secondary spectrum trading markets, auctions are widely used by spectrum holders (SHs) to redistribute their unused channels to secondary wireless service providers (WSPs). As sellers, the SHs design proper auction schemes to stimulate more participants and maximize the revenue from the auction. As buyers, the WSPs determine the bidding strategies in the auction to better serve their end users. In this paper, we consider a three-layered spectrum trading market consisting of the SH, the WSPs and the end users. We jointly study the strategies of the three parties. The SH determines the auction scheme and spectrum supplies to optimize its revenue. The WSPs have flexible bidding strategies in terms of both demands and valuations considering the strategies of the end users. We design FlexAuc, a novel auction mechanism for this market to enable dynamic supplies and demands in the auction. We prove theoretically that FlexAuc not only maximizes the social welfare but also preserves other nice properties such as truthfulness and computational tractability.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, Preliminary version accepted in INFOCOM 201

A Market-based Approach to Multi-factory Scheduling

In this paper, we report on the design of a novel market-based approach for decentralised scheduling across multiple factories. Specifically, because of the limitations of scheduling in a centralised manner -- which requires a center to have complete and perfect information for optimality and the truthful revelation of potentially commercially private preferences to that center -- we advocate an informationally decentralised approach that is both agile and dynamic. In particular, this work adopts a market-based approach for decentralised scheduling by considering the different stakeholders representing different factories as self-interested, profit-motivated economic agents that trade resources for the scheduling of jobs. The overall schedule of these jobs is then an emergent behaviour of the strategic interaction of these trading agents bidding for resources in a market based on limited information and their own preferences. Using a simple (zero-intelligence) bidding strategy, we empirically demonstrate that our market-based approach achieves a lower bound efficiency of 84%. This represents a trade-off between a reasonable level of efficiency (compared to a centralised approach) and the desirable benefits of a decentralised solution

An Investigation Report on Auction Mechanism Design

Auctions are markets with strict regulations governing the information available to traders in the market and the possible actions they can take. Since well designed auctions achieve desirable economic outcomes, they have been widely used in solving real-world optimization problems, and in structuring stock or futures exchanges. Auctions also provide a very valuable testing-ground for economic theory, and they play an important role in computer-based control systems. Auction mechanism design aims to manipulate the rules of an auction in order to achieve specific goals. Economists traditionally use mathematical methods, mainly game theory, to analyze auctions and design new auction forms. However, due to the high complexity of auctions, the mathematical models are typically simplified to obtain results, and this makes it difficult to apply results derived from such models to market environments in the real world. As a result, researchers are turning to empirical approaches. This report aims to survey the theoretical and empirical approaches to designing auction mechanisms and trading strategies with more weights on empirical ones, and build the foundation for further research in the field

Auctioning Greenhouse Gas Emissions Permits in Australia

The allocation of permits is an important design aspect of an emissions trading scheme. Traditionally, governments have favoured the free allocation of greenhouse gas permits based on individual historical emissions (‘grandfathering’) or industry benchmark data. Particularly in the EU, the free allocation of permits has proven complex and inefficient and the distributional implications are politically difficult to justify; auctioning emissions permits has therefore become more popular. The EU is now moving to auction more than 50 per cent of all permits in 2013, and in the US the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) has begun auctioning more than 90 per cent of total allowances. Another case in point is the Australian proposal for a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), which provides for auctioning a significant share of total permits. This paper discusses the proposed Australian CPRS’s auction design. A major difference to other emissions trading schemes is that the CPRS plans to auction multiple vintages of emissions permits simultaneously.Auctions, carbon auctions, greenhouse gas auctions