1,388 research outputs found
A Double-Sided Multiunit Combinatorial Auction for Substitutes: Theory and Algorithms
Combinatorial exchanges have existed for a long time in securities markets. In these auctions buyers and sellers can place orders on combinations, or bundles of different securities. These orders are conjunctive: they are matched only if the full bundle is available. On business-to-business (B2B) exchanges, buyers have the choice to receive the same product with different attributes; for instance the same product can be produced by different sellers. A buyer indicates his preference by submitting a disjunctive order, where he specifies how much of the product he wants, and how much he values each attribute. Only the goods with the best attributes and prices will be matched. This article considers a doubled-sided multi-unit combinatorial auction for substitutes, that is, a uniform price auction where buyers and sellers place both types of orders, conjunctive and disjunctive. We prove the existence of a linear price which is both competitive and surplus-maximizing when goods are perfectly divisible, and nearly so otherwise. We describe an algorithm to clear the market, which is particularly efficient when the number of traders is large.Combinatorial auction, economic equilibrium
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
Chain: A Dynamic Double Auction Framework for Matching Patient Agents
In this paper we present and evaluate a general framework for the design of
truthful auctions for matching agents in a dynamic, two-sided market. A single
commodity, such as a resource or a task, is bought and sold by multiple buyers
and sellers that arrive and depart over time. Our algorithm, Chain, provides
the first framework that allows a truthful dynamic double auction (DA) to be
constructed from a truthful, single-period (i.e. static) double-auction rule.
The pricing and matching method of the Chain construction is unique amongst
dynamic-auction rules that adopt the same building block. We examine
experimentally the allocative efficiency of Chain when instantiated on various
single-period rules, including the canonical McAfee double-auction rule. For a
baseline we also consider non-truthful double auctions populated with
zero-intelligence plus"-style learning agents. Chain-based auctions perform
well in comparison with other schemes, especially as arrival intensity falls
and agent valuations become more volatile
Approximately Efficient Double Auctions with Strong Budget Balance
Mechanism design for one-sided markets is an area of extensive research in economics and, since more than a decade, in computer science as well. Two-sided markets, on the other hand, have not received the same attention despite the numerous applications to web advertisement, stock exchange, and frequency spectrum allocation. This work studies double auctions, in which unit-demand buyers and unit-supply sellers act strategically.
An ideal goal in double auction design is to maximize the social welfare of buyers and sellers with individually rational (IR), incentive compatible (IC) and strongly budget-balanced (SBB) mechanisms. The first two properties are standard. SBB requires that the payments charged to the buyers are entirely handed to the sellers. This property is crucial in all the contexts that do not allow the auctioneer retaining a share of buyers' payments or subsidizing the market.
Unfortunately, this goal is known to be unachievable even for the special case of bilateral trade, where there is only one buyer and one seller. Therefore, in subsequent papers, meaningful trade-offs between these requirements have been investigated.
Our main contribution is the first IR, IC and SBB mechanism that provides an O(1)-approximation to the optimal social welfare. This result holds for any number of buyers and sellers with arbitrary, independent distributions. Moreover, our result continues to hold when there is an additional matroid constraint on the sets of buyers who may get allocated an item. To prove our main result, we devise an extension of sequential posted price mechanisms to two-sided markets. In addition to this, we improve the best-known approximation bounds for the bilateral trade problem
Price Discrimination in Many-to-Many Matching Markets
We study second-degree price discrimination in markets where the product traded by the monopolist is access to other agents. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the welfareand the profit-maximizing mechanisms to employ a single network or a menu of non-exclusive networks. We characterize the optimal matching schedules under a wide range of preferences, derive implications for prices, and deliver testable predictions relating the structure of the optimal pricing strategies to conditions on the distribution of match qualities. Our analysis sheds light on the distortions associated with the private provision of broadcasting, health insurance and job matching services. JEL Classification Numbers:D82matching, two-sided markets, networks, adverse selection, incentives, mechanism design
Fee-Setting Mechanisms: On Optimal Pricing by Intermediaries and Indirect Taxation
Mechanisms according to which private intermediaries or governments charge
transaction fees or indirect taxes are prevalent in practice. We consider a setup with
multiple buyers and sellers and two-sided independent private information about
valuations. We show that any weighted average of revenue and social welfare can be
maximized through appropriately chosen transaction fees and that in increasingly
thin markets such optimal fees converge to linear fees. Moreover, fees decrease with
competition (or the weight on welfare) and the elasticity of supply but decrease
with the elasticity of demand. Our theoretical predictions fit empirical observations
in several industries with intermediaries
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 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
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