Issues in Computational Vickrey Auctions

@article{Sandholm2000IssuesIC,
  title={Issues in Computational Vickrey Auctions},
  author={Tuomas Sandholm},
  journal={International Journal of Electronic Commerce},
  year={2000},
  volume={4},
  pages={107 - 129}
}
  • T. Sandholm
  • Published 1 March 2000
  • Economics
  • International Journal of Electronic Commerce
Abstract: The Vickrey auction has been widely advocated for multiagent systems. This protocol has several limitations (lower revenue than with alternative protocols, lying in non-private-value auctions, bidder collusion, lying auctioneers, undesirable revelations of sensitive information), and they are reviewed so as to guide practitioners in deciding when to use it. The special characteristics of Internet auctions are also discussed (third-party auction servers, cryptography, how proxy agents… 
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132 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
4
Background Citations
61
Methods Citations
9
Results Citations
2

132 Citations

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A taxonomy of auction models with valuation uncertainty is proposed, restricted to single-good sealed-bid auctions, in which agents have (uncertain) independent private values and can introspect about their own (but not others') valuations through possibly costly and imperfect queries.
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It is shown that is some auction mechanisms, but not others, in equilibrium the bidders compute on others' problems as well, and under the model of bounded rationality, the generalized Vickrey auction (GVA) looses its dominant strategy property.
Reducing costly information acquisition in auctions
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This paper shows that if the auction designer has some information about the agents' information-gathering processes, then it is possible to create an auction where, in equilibrium, agents have incentive to only gather information on their own valuation problems and to reveal the results truthfully to the auctioneer.
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Bidders with hard valuation problems
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It is shown that in some auction mechanisms, but not others, in equilibrium the bidders compute on others' problems as well and so must be considered when designing mechanisms for computationally limited agents.
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This paper presents a design of an auctioneer agent that uses topological structure inherent in the problem to reduce the amount of information that it needs from the bidders.
Preference Elicitation in Combinatorial Auctions (Extended Abstract)
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Differential-revelation VCG mechanisms for combinatorial auctions
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References

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