Overdemand and underdemand in economies with indivisible goods and unit demand

We study an economy where a collection of indivisible goods are sold to a set of buyers who want to buy at most one good. We characterize the set of Walrasian equilibrium price vectors in such an economy using sets of overdemanded and underdemanded goods. Further, we give characterizations for the minimum and the maximum Walrasian equilibrium price vectors of this economy. Using our characterizations, we give a suncient set of rules that generates a broad class of ascending and descending auctions in which truthful bidding is an ex post Nash equilibrium.

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.

Minimum Cost Arborescences

In this paper, we analyze the cost allocation problem when a group of agents or nodes have to be connected to a source, and where the cost matrix describing the cost of connecting each pair of agents is not necessarily symmetric, thus extending the well-studied problem of minimum cost spanning tree games, where the costs are assumed to be symmetric. The focus is on rules which satisfy axioms representing incentive and fairness properties. We show that while some results are similar, there are also signifcant differences between the frameworks corresponding to symmetric and asymmetric cost matrices.directed networks ; cost allocation ; core stability ; continuity ; cost monotonicity

Minimum cost arborescences

In this paper, we analyze the cost allocation problem when a group of agents or nodes have to be connected to a source, and where the cost matrix describing the cost of connecting each pair of agents is not necessarily symmetric, thus extending the well-studied problem of minimum cost spanning tree games, where the costs are assumed to be symmetric. The focus is on rules which satisfy axioms representing incentive and fairness properties. We show that while some results are similar, there are also signilcant dikerences between the frameworks corresponding to symmetric and asymmetric cost matrices.directed networks, cost allocation, core stability, continuity, cost monotonicity

A Characterization of the average tree solution for tree games

For the class of tree games, a new solution called the average tree solution has been proposed recently. We provide a characterization of this solution. This characterization underlines an important difference, in terms of symmetric treatment of the agents, between the average tree solution and the Myerson value for the class of tree games.tree, graph games, Myerson value, Shapley value

A foundation for dominant strategy voting mechanisms

We study deterministic voting mechanisms by considering an ordinal notion of Bayesian incentive compatibility (OBIC). If the beliefs of agents are independent and generic, we show that any OBIC mechanism is dominant strategy incentive compatible under an additional mild requirement. Our result works in a large class of preference domains (that include the unrestricted domain, the single peaked domain, a specific class of single crossing domains) and under a weaker notion of OBIC that we call locally OBIC. We also discuss the implications of assuming unanimity on our results

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.