408 research outputs found
Providing Information Feedback to Bidders in Online Multi-unit Combinatorial Auctions
Bidders in online multi-unit combinatorial auctions face the acute problem of estimating the valuations of an immense number of packages. Can the seller guide the bidders to avoid placing bids that are too high or too low? In the single unit case, fast methods are now available for incrementally computing, for each package at each time instant, the recommended lower bound (Deadness Level) and upper bound (Winning Level) on the next bid. But when there are multiple units of items, it becomes difficult to compute the Deadness Level of a package accurately. An upper bound on this quantity can be derived however, and a bid that stays within this bound and the Winning Level is âsafeâ, in the sense that it is not wasted and has the potential to become a winning bid. What is now needed is an incremental procedure for speeding up the computation of this bound
Online Auctions
The economic literature on online auctions is rapidly growing because of the enormous amount of freely available field data. Moreover, numerous innovations in auction-design features on platforms such as eBay have created excellent research opportunities. In this article, we survey the theoretical, empirical, and experimental research on bidder strategies (including the timing of bids and winner's-curse effects) and seller strategies (including reserve-price policies and the use of buy-now options) in online auctions, as well as some of the literature dealing with online-auction design (including stopping rules and multi-object pricing rules).
Rate of Price Discovery in Iterative Combinatorial Auctions
We study a class of iterative combinatorial auctions which can be viewed as
subgradient descent methods for the problem of pricing bundles to balance
supply and demand. We provide concrete convergence rates for auctions in this
class, bounding the number of auction rounds needed to reach clearing prices.
Our analysis allows for a variety of pricing schemes, including item, bundle,
and polynomial pricing, and the respective convergence rates confirm that more
expressive pricing schemes come at the cost of slower convergence. We consider
two models of bidder behavior. In the first model, bidders behave
stochastically according to a random utility model, which includes standard
best-response bidding as a special case. In the second model, bidders behave
arbitrarily (even adversarially), and meaningful convergence relies on properly
designed activity rules
Coalition Formation and Combinatorial Auctions; Applications to Self-organization and Self-management in Utility Computing
In this paper we propose a two-stage protocol for resource management in a
hierarchically organized cloud. The first stage exploits spatial locality for
the formation of coalitions of supply agents; the second stage, a combinatorial
auction, is based on a modified proxy-based clock algorithm and has two phases,
a clock phase and a proxy phase. The clock phase supports price discovery; in
the second phase a proxy conducts multiple rounds of a combinatorial auction
for the package of services requested by each client. The protocol strikes a
balance between low-cost services for cloud clients and a decent profit for the
service providers. We also report the results of an empirical investigation of
the combinatorial auction stage of the protocol.Comment: 14 page
Designing smart markets
Electronic markets have been a core topic of information systems (IS) research for last three decades. We focus on a more recent phenomenon: smart markets. This phenomenon is starting to draw considerable interdisciplinary attention from the researchers in computer science, operations research, and economics communities. The objective of this commentary is to identify and outline fruitful research areas where IS researchers can provide valuable contributions. The idea of smart markets revolves around using theoretically supported computational tools to both understand the characteristics of complex trading environments and multiechelon markets and help human decision makers make real-time decisions in these complex environments. We outline the research opportunities for complex trading environments primarily from the perspective o
07271 Abstracts Collection -- Computational Social Systems and the Internet
From 01.07. to 06.07.2007, the Dagstuhl Seminar 07271 ``Computational Social Systems and the Internet\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl.
During the seminar, several participants presented their current
research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of
the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of
seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section
describes the seminar topics and goals in general.
Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available
Design and Evaluation of Feedback Schemes for Multiattribute Procurement Auctions
Multiattribute auctions, which allow bids on multiple dimensions of the product, are IT-enabled sourcing mechanisms that increase the efficiency of procurement for configurable goods and services compared to price-only auctions. Given the strategic nature of procurement auctions, the amount of information concerning the buyerâs preferences that is disclosed to the suppliers has implications on the profits of the buyer and suppliers and, consequently, on the long-term relationship between them. This study develops novel feedback schemes for multiattribute auctions that protect buyerâs preference information from the supplier and suppliersâ cost schedule from the buyer. We conduct a laboratory experiment to study bidder behavior and profit implications under three different feedback regimes. Our results indicate that bidders are able to extract more profit with more information regarding the state of the auction in terms of provisional allocation and prices. Furthermore, bidding behavior is substantially influenced by the nature and type of feedback
Design and analysis of a smart market for industrial procurement
Title from cover. "October 15, 2000."Includes bibliographical references (leaves 40-44).Jérémie Gallien, Lawrence M. Wein
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