Bayesian sequential auctions

Syrgkanis, Vasilis; Tardos, Éva

doi:10.1145/2229012.2229082

Cited by 28 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 23 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…(an approach that has also been used in different contexts in [2,10,21,23]) with a probability distribution that depends only on the optimal allocation and the valuation function of the player. In contrast, the deviating bid we consider depends on the bid strategies at equilibrium (this is in the same spirit as the recent analysis of Feldman et al [6]) and, more interestingly, it is deterministic.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Welfare Guarantees for Proportional Allocations

Caragiannis

Voudouris

2014

Algorithmic Game Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

According to the proportional allocation mechanism from the network optimization literature, users compete for a divisible resource -such as bandwidth -by submitting bids. The mechanism allocates to each user a fraction of the resource that is proportional to her bid and collects an amount equal to her bid as payment. Since users act as utility-maximizers, this naturally defines a proportional allocation game. Recently, Syrgkanis and Tardos (STOC 2013) quantified the inefficiency of equilibria in this game with respect to the social welfare and presented a lower bound of 26.8% on the price of anarchy over coarse-correlated and Bayes-Nash equilibria in the full and incomplete information settings, respectively. In this paper, we improve this bound to 50% over both equilibrium concepts. Our analysis is simpler and, furthermore, we argue that it cannot be improved by arguments that do not take the equilibrium structure into account. We also extend it to settings with budget constraints where we show the first constant bound (between 36% and 50%) on the price of anarchy of the corresponding game with respect to an effective welfare benchmark that takes budgets into account.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Welfare Guarantees for Proportional Allocations

Caragiannis

Voudouris

2014

Algorithmic Game Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For example, can reserve prices improve the performance of CAs with item bidding in any sense? A third direction is to study systematically different single-item payment rules in sequential auctions, thereby extending the recent work in [16,20]. Finally, it would be very interesting to analyze restricted auction formats that extend simultaneous or sequential singleitem auctions, such as combinatorial auctions with restricted package bidding.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Related work on combinatorial auctions with item bidding, also mentioned above, are [2,5,21] for second-price auctions and [12] for first-price auctions. An alternative simple auction format is sequential (rather than simultaneous) single-item auctions; the price of anarchy in such auctions was studied recently in [16,20]. Most other work in theoretical computer science on combinatorial auctions has focused on truthful, dominant-strategy implementations (see [3]), with [1] being a notable exception.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Simultaneous Single-Item Auctions

Bhawalkar

Roughgarden

2012

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. In a combinatorial auction (CA) with item bidding, several goods are sold simultaneously via single-item auctions. We study how the equilibrium performance of such an auction depends on the choice of the underlying single-item auction. We provide a thorough understanding of the price of anarchy, as a function of the single-item auction payment rule. When the payment rule depends on the winner's bid, as in a first-price auction, we characterize the worst-case price of anarchy in the corresponding CAs with item bidding in terms of a sensitivity measure of the payment rule. As a corollary, we show that equilibrium existence guarantees broader than that of the first-price rule can only be achieved by sacrificing its property of having only fully efficient (pure) Nash equilibria. For payment rules that are independent of the winner's bid, we prove a strong optimality result for the canonical second-price auction. First, its set of pure Nash equilibria is always a superset of that of every other payment rule. Despite this, its worst-case POA is no worse than that of any other payment rule that is independent of the winner's bid.

show abstract

“…If the designer desires dominant strategy truthfulness but is okay with an average-case welfare guarantee, then a 1/2-approximation is known for XOS bidders [33]. Combinatorial auctions have also been studied through the lens of Price of Anarchy, but a deeper discussion of this is outside the scope of this paper [6,45,51,52,32,9,20,15,41,11,7,31].…”

Section: A Background On Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

On Simultaneous Two-player Combinatorial Auctions

Braverman

Mao

Weinberg

2018

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We consider the following communication problem: Alice and Bob each have some valuation functions v 1 (·) and v 2 (·) over subsets of m items, and their goal is to partition the items into S,S in a way that maximizes the welfare, v 1 (S)+v 2 (S). We study both the allocation problem, which asks for a welfare-maximizing partition and the decision problem, which asks whether or not there exists a partition guaranteeing certain welfare, for binary XOS valuations. For interactive protocols with poly(m) communication, a tight 3/4-approximation is known for both [29,23].For interactive protocols, the allocation problem is provably harder than the decision problem: any solution to the allocation problem implies a solution to the decision problem with one additional round and log m additional bits of communication via a trivial reduction. Surprisingly, the allocation problem is provably easier for simultaneous protocols. Specifically, we show:• There exists a simultaneous, randomized protocol with polynomial communication that selects a partition whose expected welfare is at least 3/4 of the optimum. This matches the guarantee of the best interactive, randomized protocol with polynomial communication.• For all ε > 0, any simultaneous, randomized protocol that decides whether the welfare of the optimal partition is ≥ 1 or ≤ 3/4 − 1/108 + ε correctly with probability > 1/2 + 1/poly(m) requires exponential communication. (≤ 3/4 − 1/108) protocols with polynomial communication. In other words, this trivial reduction from decision to allocation problems provably requires the extra round of communication. We further discuss the implications of our results for the design of truthful combinatorial auctions in general, and extensions to general XOS valuations. In particular, our protocol for the allocation problem implies a new style of truthful mechanisms. IntroductionIntuitively, search problems (find the optimal solution) are considered "strictly harder" than decision problems (does a solution with quality ≥ Q exist?) for the following (formal) reason: once you find the optimal solution, you can simply evaluate it and check whether its quality is ≥ Q or not. The same intuition carries over to approximation as well: once you find a solution whose quality is within a factor α of optimal, you can distinguish between cases where solutions with quality ≥ Q exist and those where all solutions have quality ≤ αQ. The easy conclusion one then draws is that the communication (resp. runtime) required for an α-approximation to any decision problem is upper bounded by the communication (resp. runtime) required for an α-approximation to the corresponding search problem plus the communication (resp. runtime) required to evaluate the quality of a proposed solution.Note though that for communication problems, in addition to the negligible increase in communication (due to evaluating the quality of the proposed solution), this simple reduction might also require (at least) an extra round of communication (because the parties can evalua...

show abstract

Bayesian sequential auctions

Cited by 28 publications

References 23 publications

Welfare Guarantees for Proportional Allocations

Welfare Guarantees for Proportional Allocations

Simultaneous Single-Item Auctions

On Simultaneous Two-player Combinatorial Auctions

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About