Peculiarities of the Major League Baseball Posting System

The posting system used in major league baseball to obtain free agent players from Japan has some similarities and many differences from the transfer system used to obtain foreign free agents in European football. This paper uses auction theory to assess the efficiencies (or lack of) in the posting system and to suggest alternatives.posting system; baseball; auction theory; winner's curse

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

Auctions and Corruption

In many auctions, the auctioneer is an agent of the seller. This delegation invites corruption. In this paper we propose a model of corruption, examine how corruption affects the auction game, how the anticipation of corruption affects bidding, and how it altogether changes the revenue ranking of typical auctions. In addition we characterize incentive schemes that may prevent corruption, and compare them to the fee schedules employed by major auction houses.Auctions, procurement, corruption, collusion, coalitions

Strategic manipulations and collusions in Knaster procedure: a comment

The note examines the susceptibility of envy-free variants of Knaster procedure to manipulations and collusions .Steinhaus-Knaster procedure; auction; insincere bidding.

How the U.S. Treasury should auction its debt

The U.S. Treasury could raise more revenue if it changed the way it auctions its debt. Under the current procedure, all bidders whose competitive bids for Treasury securities are accepted pay the prices they bid; different winning bidders, that is, pay different prices. Instead, economic theory says, all winning bidders should all pay the same price—that of the highest bid not accepted, or the price that just clears the market. This procedural change would increase the revenue that Treasury auctions raise primarily because it would decrease the amount of resources that bidders would spend collecting information about what other bidders are likely to do. It would also reduce the incentives for traders to attempt to manipulate the securities market.Government securities

Quantum sealed-bid auction using a modified scheme for multiparty circular quantum key agreement

A feasible, secure and collusion-attack-free quantum sealed-bid auction protocol is proposed using a modified scheme for multi-party circular quantum key agreement. In the proposed protocol, the set of all ($n$) bidders is grouped in to $l$ subsets (sub-circles) in such a way that only the initiator (who prepares the quantum state to be distributed for a particular round of communication and acts as the receiver in that round) is a member of all the subsets (sub-circles) prepared for a particular round, while any other bidder is part of only a single subset. All $n$ bidders and auctioneer initiate one round of communication, and each of them prepares $l$ copies of a $\left(r-1\right)$-partite entangled state (one for each sub-circle), where $r=\frac{n}{l}+1$. The efficiency and security\textcolor{blue}{{} }of the proposed protocol are critically analyzed. It is shown that the proposed protocol is free from the collusion attacks that are possible on the existing schemes of quantum sealed-bid auction. Further, it is observed that the security against collusion attack increases with the increase in $l$, but that reduces the complexity (number of entangled qubits in each entangled state) of the entangled states to be used and that makes the scheme scalable and implementable with the available technologies. The additional security and scalability is shown to arise due to the use of a circular structure in place of a complete-graph or tree-type structure used earlier.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure