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.

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

Sets in Excess Demand in Ascending Auctions with Unit-Demand Bidders

This paper analyzes the problem of selling a number of indivisible items to a set of unitdemand bidders. An ascending auction mechanism called the Excess Demand Ascending Auction (EDAA) is defined. The main results demonstrate that EDAA terminates in a finite number of iterations and that the exact auction mechanism in Demange, Gale and Sotomayor (J. Polit. Economy 94: 863–872, 1986) and its modification based on the Ford- Fulkerson method, proposed by Sankaran (Math. Soc. Sci. 28: 143–150, 1994), reduce to special cases of EDAA.Multi-item auction;Unit-demand bidders;Excess demand;Algorithms

FLOCK: Fast, Lightweight, and Scalable Allocation for Decentralized Services on Blockchain

Many decentralized services have recently emerged on top of blockchain, offering benefits like privacy, and allowing any node in the network to share its resources. In order to be a competitive alternative to their central counterparts, their performance needs to match up. Specifically, service allocation remains a performance bottleneck for many decentralized services.In this paper we present FLOCK, an allocation system which is highly scalable, fast, and lightweight. Furthermore, it allows nodes to indicate their preference for clients/sellers without needing to submit bids by using stable matching algorithms. We decouple the price discovery and outsource this function to a smart contract on the blockchain.Additionally, another smart contract is used to orchestrate the allocation and take care of service discovery, while trusted execution environments securely compute allocation solutions, and off-chain payment networks are used to send rewards.Evaluation of FLOCK shows that gas costs are manageable and improve upon other solutions which leverage auctions, and that our instance of the stable matching algorithm greatly improves run-time and throughput over auction counterparts. Finally, our discussion outlines practical improvements to further increase performance

DEEM: Enabling microservices via DEvice edge markets

Native applications running over handheld devices have an irreplaceable role in users' daily activities. That said, recent studies show that users download on average zero new applications on monthly basis, which suggests that new apps can face discoverability issues. In this work, we aim for a web-based, download/installation-free access to native application features through microservices (μ Services)that are shared between user devices in a peer-to-peer (P2P)manner. Such a P2P approach is self-scalable and requires no investment for μ Service deployment, unlike mobile edge computing or Data Centre. We introduce DEEM, a DEvice Edge Market design that enables device-hosted μServices to end-users. In DEEM, μ Service-based markets act as rendezvous points between available μ Service instances and clients. DEEM ensures the i) assignment of instances to the users that value them the most, in terms of QoS gain, and ii) devices' income maximisation. Our evaluation on synthetic settings demonstrates DEEM's capability in exploiting the pool of device instances for improving the application QoS in terms of latency

Characterization of the walrasian equilibria of the assignment model

We study the assignment model where a collection of indivisible goods are sold to a set of buyers who want to buy at most one good. We characterize the extreme and interior points of the set of Walrasian equilibrium price vectors for this model. Our characterizations are in terms of demand sets of buyers. Using these characterizations, we also give a unique characterization of the minimum and the maximum Walrasian equilibrium price vectors. Also, necessary and suncient conditions are given under which the interior of the set of Walrasian equilibrium price vectors is non-empty. Several of the results are derived by interpreting Walrasian equilibrium price vectors as potential functions of an appropriate directed graph.

An Optimal ICO Mechanism

Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) are raising billions in funding using multiple strategies, none justified from the point of view of mechanism design, resulting in severe underpricing and high volatility. In the present paper, an optimal ICO mechanism is proposed for the first time: a truthful multi-unit Vickrey-Dutch auction of callable tokens (i.e., a new hybrid security of tokens packaged with callable warrants). Truthful bidding is an ex-post Nash equilibrium strategy and the auction terminates with an ex-post efficient allocation; additionally, the callability of the warrants eliminates the winner’s curse of the auction and its underpricing. An implementation demonstrates its practical viability

An Optimal ICO Mechanism

Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) are raising billions in funding using multiple strategies, none justified from the point of view of mechanism design, resulting in severe underpricing and high volatility. In the present paper, an optimal ICO mechanism is proposed for the first time: a truthful multi-unit Vickrey-Dutch auction of callable tokens (i.e., a new hybrid security of tokens packaged with callable warrants). Truthful bidding is an ex-post Nash equilibrium strategy and the auction terminates with an ex-post efficient allocation; additionally, the callability of the warrants eliminates the winner’s curse of the auction and its underpricing. An implementation demonstrates its practical viability

An Optimal ICO Mechanism

Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) are raising billions in funding using multiple strategies, none justified from the point of view of mechanism design, resulting in severe underpricing and high volatility. In the present paper, an optimal ICO mechanism is proposed for the first time: a truthful multi-unit Vickrey-Dutch auction of callable tokens (i.e., a new hybrid security of tokens packaged with callable warrants). Truthful bidding is an ex-post Nash equilibrium strategy and the auction terminates with an ex-post efficient allocation; additionally, the callability of the warrants eliminates the winner’s curse of the auction and its underpricing. An implementation demonstrates its practical viability