ACM Home Page
Please provide us with feedback. Feedback
Combinatorial auctions with decreasing marginal utilities
Full text PdfPdf (241 KB)
Source Electronic Commerce archive
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM conference on Electronic Commerce table of contents
Tampa, Florida, USA
Pages: 18 - 28  
Year of Publication: 2001
ISBN:1-58113-387-1
Authors
Benny Lehmann  Digital Fuel
Daniel Lehmann  The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Noam Nisan  The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Sponsor
SIGEcom: ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce
Publisher
ACM  New York, NY, USA
Bibliometrics
Downloads (6 Weeks): 5,   Downloads (12 Months): 36,   Citation Count: 24
Additional Information:

abstract   references   cited by   index terms   collaborative colleagues  

Tools and Actions: Request Permissions Request Permissions    Review this Article  
DOI Bookmark: Use this link to bookmark this Article: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/501158.501161
What is a DOI?

ABSTRACT

In most of microeconomic theory, consumers are assumed to exhibit decreasing marginal utilities. This paper considers combinatorial auctions among such buyers. The valuations of such buyers are placed within a hierarchy of valuations that exhibit no complementarities, a hierarchy that includes also OR and XOR combinations of singleton valuations, and valuations satisfying the gross substitutes property. While we show that the allocation problem among valuations with decreasing marginal utilities is NP-hard, we present an efficient greedy 2-approximation algorithm for this case. No such approximation algorithm exists in a setting allowing for complementarities. Some results about strategic aspects of combinatorial auctions among players with decreasing marginal utilities are also presented.


REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

 
1
Lawrence M.Ausubel.An e .cient dynamic auction for heterogeneous commodities..rst draft:5 July 2000,8 September 2000.
 
2
Sven de Vries and Rakesh Vohra.Combinatorial auctions:A survey. http://www.kellogg.nwu.edu/faculty/vohra/htm/res.htm, January 2001.
3
 
4
 
5
6
 
7
F.Gul and E.Stacchetti.Walrasian equilibrium with gross substitutes.Journal of Economic Theory , 87:95 -124,1999.
 
8
F.Gul and E.Stacchetti.The english auction with di .erentiated commodities.Journal of Economic Theory ,92:66 -95,2000.
 
9
A.S.Kelso and V.P.Crawford.Job matching, coalition formation and gross substitutes. Econometrica ,50:1483 -1504,1982.
10
 
11
 
12
Je .rey K.MacKie-Mason and Hal R.Varian. Generalized Vickrey auctions.Working paper,Un.of Michigan,July 1994.
 
13
H.Moulin.Axioms of Cooperative Decision Making . Cambridge Universit Press,Cambridge,U.K.,1988.
 
14
H.Nara anan.Submodular Functions and Electrical Networks ,volume54of Annals of Discrete Mathematics .North-Holland,1997.
15
 
16
Noam Nisan.The Communication Complexit of Combinatorial Auctions.Preprint,2001.Available from http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~noam/mkts.html.
 
17
 
18
 
19
 
20
 
21
 
22
Moshe Tennenholtz.Some tractable combinatorial auctions.Unpublished draft:January 2000.
 
23
Hal R.Varian.Economic mechanism design for computerized agents.In Proceedings of the First Usenix Conference on Electronic Commerce ,New York,July 1995.
 
24
William S.Vickrey.Counterspeculation,auctions and competitive sealed tenders.Journal of Finance , 16:8 -37,1961.
 
25
 
26
 
27

CITED BY  24

Collaborative Colleagues:
Benny Lehmann: colleagues
Daniel Lehmann: colleagues
Noam Nisan: colleagues