Multi-item Vickrey-Dutch auctions

Descending price auctions are adopted for goods that must be sold quickly and in private values environments, for instance in flower, fish, and tobacco auctions. In this paper, we introduce ex post efficient descending auctions for two environments: multiple non-identical items and buyers with unit-demand valuations; and multiple identical items and buyers with non-increasing marginal values. Our auctions are designed using the notion of universal competitive equilibrium (UCE) prices and they terminate with UCE prices, from which the Vickrey payments can be determined. For the unit-demand setting, our auction maintains linear and anonymous prices. For the homogeneous items setting, our auction maintains a single price and adopts Ausubel's notion of "clinching" to compute the final payments dynamically. The auctions support truthful bidding in an ex post Nash equilibrium and terminate with an ex post efficient allocation. In simulation, we illustrate the speed and elicitation advantages of these auctions over their ascending price counterparts.

Integration of Blockchain and Auction Models: A Survey, Some Applications, and Challenges

In recent years, blockchain has gained widespread attention as an emerging technology for decentralization, transparency, and immutability in advancing online activities over public networks. As an essential market process, auctions have been well studied and applied in many business fields due to their efficiency and contributions to fair trade. Complementary features between blockchain and auction models trigger a great potential for research and innovation. On the one hand, the decentralized nature of blockchain can provide a trustworthy, secure, and cost-effective mechanism to manage the auction process; on the other hand, auction models can be utilized to design incentive and consensus protocols in blockchain architectures. These opportunities have attracted enormous research and innovation activities in both academia and industry; however, there is a lack of an in-depth review of existing solutions and achievements. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of these two research topics. We review the existing solutions for integrating blockchain and auction models, with some application-oriented taxonomies generated. Additionally, we highlight some open research challenges and future directions towards integrated blockchain-auction models

PS-TRUST: Provably Secure Solution for Truthful Double Spectrum Auctions

Truthful spectrum auctions have been extensively studied in recent years. Truthfulness makes bidders bid their true valuations, simplifying greatly the analysis of auctions. However, revealing one's true valuation causes severe privacy disclosure to the auctioneer and other bidders. To make things worse, previous work on secure spectrum auctions does not provide adequate security. In this paper, based on TRUST, we propose PS-TRUST, a provably secure solution for truthful double spectrum auctions. Besides maintaining the properties of truthfulness and special spectrum reuse of TRUST, PS-TRUST achieves provable security against semi-honest adversaries in the sense of cryptography. Specifically, PS-TRUST reveals nothing about the bids to anyone in the auction, except the auction result. To the best of our knowledge, PS-TRUST is the first provably secure solution for spectrum auctions. Furthermore, experimental results show that the computation and communication overhead of PS-TRUST is modest, and its practical applications are feasible.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Infocom 201

Multi-Item Vickrey-Dutch Auctions

Descending price auctions are adopted for goods that must be sold quickly and in private values environments, for instance in flower, fish, and tobacco auctions. In this paper, we introduce efficient descending auctions for two environments: multiple non-identical items and buyers with unit-demand valuations; and multiple identical items and buyers with non-increasing marginal values. Our auctions are designed using the notion of universal competitive equilibrium (UCE) prices and they terminate with UCE prices, from which the Vickrey payments can be determined. For the unit-demand setting, our auction maintains linear and anonymous prices. For the homogeneous items setting, our auction maintains a single price and adopts Ausubel's notion of “clinching” to compute the final payments dynamically. The auctions support truthful bidding in an ex post Nash equilibrium and terminate with an efficient allocation. In simulation, we illustrate the speed and elicitation advantages of these auctions over their ascending price counterparts.Engineering and Applied Science

The Clock-Proxy Auction: A Practical Combinatorial Auction Design

We propose the clock-proxy auction as a practical means for auctioning many related items. A clock auction phase is followed by a last-and-final proxy round. The approach combines the simple and transparent price discovery of the clock auction with the efficiency of the proxy auction. Linear pricing is maintained as long as possible, but then is abandoned in the proxy round to improve efficiency and enhance seller revenues. The approach has many advantages over the simultaneous ascending auction. In particular, the clock-proxy auction has no exposure problem, eliminates incentives for demand reduction, and prevents most collusive bidding strategies.Auctions, Combinatorial Auctions, Market Design, Clock Auctions

An experimental analysis of grandfathering vs dynamic auctioning in the EU ETS

This study constitutes a first attempt to experimentally test the performance of a 100% auction versus a 100% free allocation of CO2 permits under the rules and parameters that mimic the EU ETS (imperfect competition, uncertainty in emissions’ control, and allowing banking). It also incorporates a first attempt to include in the analysis measures of the risk preferences of subjects participating in emission permits experiments. Another distinctive feature of this study is the implementation of a theoretically appropriate auction format for the primary allocation of emission permits. Our experimental results indicate that the EU ETS has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions, achieving targets considerably more restrictive than the current ones at high efficiency levels, both with auctioned and free emission permits. Auctioning, however, reveals a clear potential to do better than grandfathering the initial allocation of permits. In addition, the results reveal that concerns about undue scarcity, and corresponding high prices, in secondary markets generated by a primary auction market are not warranted under the proposed dynamic auction format.EU ETS, auctioning, grandfathering, banking, Ausubel auction