Related papers: Core-competitive Auctions
Standard ad auction formats do not immediately extend to settings where multiple size configurations and layouts are available to advertisers. In these settings, the sale of web advertising space increasingly resembles a combinatorial…
Core-selecting combinatorial auctions are popular auction designs that constrain prices to eliminate the incentive for any group of bidders -- with the seller -- to renegotiate for a better deal. They help overcome the low-revenue issues of…
Combinatorial auctions (CAs) allow bidders to express complex preferences for bundles of goods being auctioned. However, the behavior of bidders under different payment rules is often unclear. In this paper, we aim to understand how core…
The existence of incentive-compatible computationally-efficient protocols for combinatorial auctions with decent approximation ratios is the paradigmatic problem in computational mechanism design. It is believed that in many cases good…
We study the design of truthful auctions for selling identical items in unlimited supply (e.g., digital goods) to n unit demand buyers. This classic problem stands out from profit-maximizing auction design literature as it requires no…
In settings where full incentive-compatibility is not available, such as core-constraint combinatorial auctions and budget-balanced combinatorial exchanges, we may wish to design mechanisms that are as incentive-compatible as possible. This…
Most of the work in the auction design literature assumes that bidders behave rationally based on the information available for every individual auction, and the revelation principle enables designers to restrict their efforts to incentive…
Combinatorial auctions (CA) are a well-studied area in algorithmic mechanism design. However, contrary to the standard model, empirical studies suggest that a bidder's valuation often does not depend solely on the goods assigned to him. For…
Two general algorithms based on opportunity costs are given for approximating a revenue-maximizing set of bids an auctioneer should accept, in a combinatorial auction in which each bidder offers a price for some subset of the available…
The Competition Complexity of an auction measures how much competition is needed for the revenue of a simple auction to surpass the optimal revenue. A classic result from auction theory by Bulow and Klemperer [9], states that the…
With the growth of networks, promoting products through social networks has become an important problem. For auctions in social networks, items are needed to be sold to agents in a network, where each agent can bid and also diffuse the sale…
The Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism is infamously revenue non-monotone in combinatorial auctions. I.e., when a buyer increases their value for a bundle of items, the total auction revenue may decrease. Combinatorial auctions exhibit…
Building on the linear programming approach to competitive equilibrium pricing, we develop a general method for constructing iterative auctions that achieve Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) outcomes. We show how to transform a linear program…
The competition complexity of an auction setting is the number of additional bidders needed such that the simple mechanism of selling items separately (with additional bidders) achieves greater revenue than the optimal but complex…
In a sponsored search auction, decisions about how to rank ads impose tradeoffs between objectives such as revenue and welfare. In this paper, we examine how these tradeoffs should be made. We begin by arguing that the most natural solution…
Core-selecting combinatorial auctions (CAs) restrict the auction result in the core such that no coalitions could improve their utilities by engaging in collusion. The minimum-revenue-core (MRC) rule is a widely used core-selecting payment…
Recent spectrum auctions in the United Kingdom, and some proposals for future auctions of spectrum in the United States, are based on preliminary price discovery rounds, followed by calculation of final prices for the winning buyers. For…
We discuss bundle auctions within the framework of an integer allocation problem. We show that for multi-unit auctions, of which bundle auctions are a special case, market equilibrium and constrained market equilibrium are equivalent…
Diffusion auction design for combinatorial settings is a long-standing challenge. One difficulty is that we cannot directly extend the solutions for simpler settings to combinatorial settings (like extending the Vickrey auction to VCG in…
Many popular search engines run an auction to determine the placement of advertisements next to search results. Current auctions at Google and Yahoo! let advertisers specify a single amount as their bid in the auction. This bid is…