Characterization of strategy/false-name proof combinatorial auction protocols: price-oriented, rationing-free protocol

  • Authors:
  • Makoto Yokoo

  • Affiliations:
  • NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Soraku-gun, Kyoto, Japan

  • Venue:
  • IJCAI'03 Proceedings of the 18th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

This paper introduces a new distinctive class of combinatorial auction protocols called price-oriented, rationing-free (PORF) protocols. The outline of a PORF protocol is as follows: (i) for each bidder, the price of each bundle of goods is determined independently of his/her own declaration (while it can depend on the declarations of other bidders), (ii) we allocate each bidder a bundle that maximizes his/her utility independently of the allocations of other bidders (i.e., rationing-free). Although a PORF protocol appears quite different from traditional protocol descriptions, surprisingly, it is a sufficient and necessary condition for a protocol to be strategy-proof. Furthermore, we show that a PORF protocol satisfying additional conditions is false-name-proof; at the same time, any false-name-proof protocol can be described as a PORF protocol that satisfies the additional conditions. A PORF protocol is an innovative characterization of strategy-proof protocols and the first attempt to characterize false-name-proof protocols. Such a characterization is not only theoretically significant but also useful in practice, since it can serve as a guideline for developing new strategy/false-name proof protocols. We present a new false-name-proof protocol based on the concept of a PORF protocol.