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An expressive mechanism for auctions on the web

Dütting, Paul, Henzinger, Monika and Weber, Ingmar (2011) An expressive mechanism for auctions on the web. In: Srinivasan, Sadagopan, Ramamritham, Krithi, Kumar, Arun, Ravindra, M.P, Bertino, Elisa and Kumarq, Ravi, (eds.) Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on World Wide Web. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, pp. 127-136. ISBN 9781450306324

Full text not available from this repository.
Identification Number: 10.1145/1963405.1963427

Abstract

Auctions are widely used on the Web. Applications range from internet advertising to platforms such as eBay. In most of these applications the auctions in use are single/multi-item auctions with unit demand. The main drawback of standard mechanisms for this type of auctions, such as VCG and GSP, is the limited expressiveness that they offer to the bidders. The General Auction Mechanism (GAM) of [1] is taking a first step towards addressing the problem of limited expressiveness by computing a bidder optimal, envy free outcome for linear utility functions with identical slopes and a single discontinuity per bidder-item pair. We show that in many practical situations this does not suffice to adequately model the preferences of the bidders, and we overcome this problem by presenting the first mechanism for piece-wise linear utility functions with non-identical slopes and multiple discontinuities. Our mechanism runs in polynomial time. Like GAM it is incentive compatible for inputs that fulfill a certain non-degeneracy requirement, but our requirement is more general than the requirement of GAM. For discontinuous utility functions that are non-degenerate as well as for continuous utility functions the outcome of our mechanism is a competitive equilibrium. We also show how our mechanism can be used to compute approximately bidder optimal, envy free outcomes for a general class of continuous utility functions via piece-wise linear approximation. Finally, we prove hardness results for even more expressive settings.

Item Type: Book Section
Official URL: http://wwwconference.org/www2011/
Additional Information: © 2011 Association for Computing Machinery
Divisions: Mathematics
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Date Deposited: 16 Nov 2017 16:02
Last Modified: 11 Jan 2024 23:24
URI: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/85617

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