Fairness in Recurrent Auctions With Competing Markets and Supply Fluctuations

Abstract

Auctions have been used to deal with resource allocation in multiagent environments, especially in serviceoriented electronic markets. In this type of market, resources are perishable and auctions are repeated over time with the same or a very similar set of agents. In this scenario it is advisable to use recurrent auctions: a sequence of auctions of any kind where the result of one auction may influence the following one. Some problems do appear in these situations, as for instance, the bidder drop problem, the asymmetric balance of negotiation power or resource waste, which could cause the market to collapse. Fair mechanisms can be useful to minimize the effects of these problems. With this aim, we have analyzed four previous fair mechanisms under dynamic scenarios and we have proposed a new one that takes into account changes in the supply as well as the presence of alternative marketplaces. We experimentally show how the new mechanism presents a higher average performance under all simulated conditions, resulting in a higher profit for the auctioneer than with the previous ones, and in most cases avoiding the waste of resources.

Multi-dimensional fairness for auction-based resource allocation

“…Despite it has been proven that preserving the number of participants in an auction increases its efficiency in the mid and long term [16] and that evaluating fairness from a multi-dimensional point of view can lead to a higher customer satisfaction, few research has been done in the field of fairness in recurrent auctions. From the best of our knowledge, there are no previous auction approaches dealing with fairness from a multidimensional point of view; however, there are some previous works involving a single factor, the price, conditioning fairness.…”

Multi-attribute auctions with different types of attributes: Enacting properties in multi-attribute auctions

“…In general, fair mechanisms maintain agents interested in the auction after running several auctions, and maintaining the number of participants increases the revenue of the auctioneer at the mid and long term, (see, for example, Murillo et al (2012)'s work for an experimental approach).…”

“…This approach is similar to trust-based approaches as Ramchurn et al (2009) where, to enhance robust allocations, agents describe other agents reliability using a trust parameter and including this parameter in the winner determination phase. In the same line, in priority auctions (PA) (Murillo et al, 2012) the auctioneer uses a priority attribute in order to obtain egalitarian allocations. In our approach, attributes may come from the auctioneer but bidders can also express quality values in multiple attributes, so, in some way, our proposal could be considered as an extension of these kinds of auctions (we propose to use one or more attributes incorpored by the auctioneer but also multiple attributes by the bidders side).…”

“…Moreover, in some uni-attribute auctions the auction is cleared by taking into account other attributes besides the ones offered by the bidder. For instance, information about bidders' past performance Ramchurn et al (2009) (reliable or not), previous auction results Murillo et al (2012) (the number of auctions which an agent has won) or opinions which the auctioneer has in regard to bidders Varian (2007) can be taken into account when deciding the forthcoming winners.…”

“…This type of allocation can be useful to keep bidders interested in future auctions and to avoid recurrent auction problems such as the bidders drop problem Murillo et al (2012); Lematre et al (2003).…”