Security bid auctions for agency contracts

A principal uses security bid auctions to award an incentive contract to one among several agents, in the presence of hidden action and hidden information. Securities range from cash to equity and call options. “Steeper” securities are better surplus extractors that narrow the gap between the two highest valuations, yet reduce effort incentives. In view of this trade-off, the generalized equity auction that includes a (possibly negative) cash reward to the winner tends to outperform all other auctions, although it cannot extract the entire surplus implement efficient effort. Hence, profit sharing emerges without risk aversion or limited liability

A Near-Optimal Mechanism for Impartial Selection

We examine strategy-proof elections to select a winner amongst a set of agents, each of whom cares only about winning. This impartial selection problem was introduced independently by Holzman and Moulin and Alon et al. Fisher and Klimm showed that the permutation mechanism is impartial and $1/2$-optimal, that is, it selects an agent who gains, in expectation, at least half the number of votes of most popular agent. Furthermore, they showed the mechanism is $7/12$-optimal if agents cannot abstain in the election. We show that a better guarantee is possible, provided the most popular agent receives at least a large enough, but constant, number of votes. Specifically, we prove that, for any $\epsilon>0$, there is a constant $N_{\epsilon}$ (independent of the number $n$ of voters) such that, if the maximum number of votes of the most popular agent is at least $N_{\epsilon}$ then the permutation mechanism is $(\frac{3}{4}-\epsilon)$-optimal. This result is tight. Furthermore, in our main result, we prove that near-optimal impartial mechanisms exist. In particular, there is an impartial mechanism that is $(1-\epsilon)$-optimal, for any $\epsilon>0$, provided that the maximum number of votes of the most popular agent is at least a constant $M_{\epsilon}$

FlexAuc: Serving Dynamic Demands in a Spectrum Trading Market with Flexible Auction

In secondary spectrum trading markets, auctions are widely used by spectrum holders (SHs) to redistribute their unused channels to secondary wireless service providers (WSPs). As sellers, the SHs design proper auction schemes to stimulate more participants and maximize the revenue from the auction. As buyers, the WSPs determine the bidding strategies in the auction to better serve their end users. In this paper, we consider a three-layered spectrum trading market consisting of the SH, the WSPs and the end users. We jointly study the strategies of the three parties. The SH determines the auction scheme and spectrum supplies to optimize its revenue. The WSPs have flexible bidding strategies in terms of both demands and valuations considering the strategies of the end users. We design FlexAuc, a novel auction mechanism for this market to enable dynamic supplies and demands in the auction. We prove theoretically that FlexAuc not only maximizes the social welfare but also preserves other nice properties such as truthfulness and computational tractability.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, Preliminary version accepted in INFOCOM 201

Innovation Contests with Entry Auction

We consider procurement of an innovation from heterogeneous sellers. Innovations are random but depend on unobservable effort and private information. We compare two procurement mechanisms where potential sellers first bid in an auction for admission to an innovation contest. After the contest, an innovation is procured employing either a fixed prize or a first-price auction. We characterize Bayesian Nash equilibria such that both mechanisms are payoff-equivalent and induce the same efforts and innovations. In these equilibria, signaling in the entry auction does not occur since contestants play a simple strategy that does not depend on rivals' private information

Economics of intelligent selection of wireless access networks in a market-based framework : a game-theoretic approach

The Digital Marketplace is a market-based framework where network operators offer communications services with competition at the call level. It strives to address a tussle between the actors involved in a heterogeneous wireless access network. However, as with any market-like institution, it is vital to analyze the Digital Marketplace from the strategic perspective to ensure that all shortcomings are removed prior to implementation. In this paper, we analyze the selling mechanism proposed in the Digital Marketplace. The mechanism is based on a procurement first-price sealed-bid auction where the network operators represent the sellers/bidders, and the end-user of a wireless service is the buyer. However, this auction format is somewhat unusual as the winning bid is a composition of both the network operator’s monetary bid and their reputation rating. We create a simple economic model of the auction, and we show that it is mathematically intractable to derive the equilibrium bidding behavior when there are N network operators, and we make only generic assumptions about the structure of the bidding strategies. We then move on to consider a scenario with only two network operators, and assume that network operators use bidding strategies which are linear functions of their costs. This results in the derivation of the equilibrium bidding behavior in that scenario

CENTURION: Incentivizing Multi-Requester Mobile Crowd Sensing

The recent proliferation of increasingly capable mobile devices has given rise to mobile crowd sensing (MCS) systems that outsource the collection of sensory data to a crowd of participating workers that carry various mobile devices. Aware of the paramount importance of effectively incentivizing participation in such systems, the research community has proposed a wide variety of incentive mechanisms. However, different from most of these existing mechanisms which assume the existence of only one data requester, we consider MCS systems with multiple data requesters, which are actually more common in practice. Specifically, our incentive mechanism is based on double auction, and is able to stimulate the participation of both data requesters and workers. In real practice, the incentive mechanism is typically not an isolated module, but interacts with the data aggregation mechanism that aggregates workers' data. For this reason, we propose CENTURION, a novel integrated framework for multi-requester MCS systems, consisting of the aforementioned incentive and data aggregation mechanism. CENTURION's incentive mechanism satisfies truthfulness, individual rationality, computational efficiency, as well as guaranteeing non-negative social welfare, and its data aggregation mechanism generates highly accurate aggregated results. The desirable properties of CENTURION are validated through both theoretical analysis and extensive simulations