Mergers and collusion in all-pay auctions and crowdsourcing contests

Authors:
Omer Lev;Maria Polukarov;Yoram Bachrach;Jeffrey S. Rosenschein
Affiliations:
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel;University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom;Microsoft Research, Cambridge, United Kingdom;The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2013 international conference on Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems
Year:
2013

Citing 6
Cited 1

Crowdsourcing and all-pay auctions

Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Honor among thieves: collusion in multi-unit auctions

Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems: volume 1 - Volume 1
Collusion in VCG path procurement auctions

WINE'10 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Internet and network economics
A cooperative approach to collusion in auctions

ACM SIGecom Exchanges
False-name manipulations in weighted voting games

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
Coalitional voting manipulation: a game-theoretic perspective

IJCAI'11 Proceedings of the Twenty-Second international joint conference on Artificial Intelligence - Volume Volume One

Agent failures in all-pay auctions

IJCAI'13 Proceedings of the Twenty-Third international joint conference on Artificial Intelligence

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We study the effects of bidder collaboration in all-pay auctions. We analyse both mergers, where the remaining players are aware of the agreement between the cooperating participants, and collusion, where the remaining players are unaware of this agreement. We examine two scenarios: the sum-profit model where the auctioneer obtains the sum of all submitted bids, and the max-profit model of crowdsourcing contests where the auctioneer can only use the best submissions and thus obtains only the winning bid. We show that while mergers do not change the expected utility of the participants, or the principal's utility in the sum-profit model, collusion transfers the utility from the non-colluders to the colluders. Surprisingly, we find that in some cases such collaboration can increase the social welfare. Moreover, mergers and, curiously, also collusion can even be beneficial to the auctioneer under certain conditions.