A combinatorial procurement auction featuring bundle price revelation without free-riding
Decision Support Systems
Computing core payments in combinatorial auctions
ACM SIGecom Exchanges
Matrix Bidding in Combinatorial Auctions
Operations Research
ICE: an expressive iterative combinatorial exchange
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
A Practical Combinatorial Clock Exchange for Spectrum Licenses
Decision Analysis
Network Design and Allocation Mechanisms for Carrier Alliances in Liner Shipping
Operations Research
Average-case analysis of mechanism design with approximate resource allocation algorithms
WINE'10 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Internet and network economics
The Clock Proxy Auction for Allocating Radio Spectrum Licenses
Computational Economics
Average-case analysis of VCG with approximate resource allocation algorithms
Decision Support Systems
Designing Mechanisms for the Management of Carrier Alliances
Transportation Science
Quadratic Core-Selecting Payment Rules for Combinatorial Auctions
Operations Research
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Motivated by the increasing use of auctions by government agencies, we consider the problem of fairly pricing public goods in a combinatorial auction. A well-known problem with the incentive-compatible Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction mechanism is that the resulting prices may not be in the core. Loosely speaking, this means the payments of the winners could be so low, that there are bidders who would have been willing to pay more than the payments of the winning bidders. Clearly, this “unfair” outcome is unacceptable for a public sector auction. Recent advances in auction theory suggest that combinatorial auctions resulting in efficient outcomes and bidder-Pareto-optimal core payments offer a viable practical alternative to address this problem. This paper confronts two critical issues facing the bidder-Pareto-optimal core payment. First, motivated to minimize a bidder's ability to benefit through strategic manipulation (through collusive agreement or unilateral action), we demonstrate the strength of a mechanism that minimizes total payments among all such auction outcomes, narrowing the previously broad solution concept. Second, we address the computational difficulties of achieving these outcomes with a constraint-generation approach, promising to broaden the range of applications for which bidder-Pareto-optimal core pricing achieves a comfortably rapid solution.