On the incentive properties of multi-item auctions
International Journal of Game Theory
Iterative Combinatorial Auctions: Theory and Practice
Proceedings of the Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Twelfth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence
Auction algorithms for market equilibrium
STOC '04 Proceedings of the thirty-sixth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Electronic Commerce Research
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Decentralized multi-item auctions offer great opportunities for integrating fragmented online auction markets into larger markets with more efficient outcomes. This paper extends the theory of multi-item ascending auctions of substitutes by considering any finite positive bid increment and allowing the bidders to bid asyn-chronously instead of bidding in a round-robin fashion. We consider a setup where the bidders' utilities over multiple items are additive and bound the maximum inefficiency in the allocation when the bidders follow a simple greedy strategy. We also obtain the limits within which the prices of individual items can vary from one outcome to another. For the special case of single unit bidder demand, we also bound the maximum surplus which a bidder can extract by unilaterally switching to some other strategy. The paper suggests an upper bound for the minimum required bid increment which would be necessary for competitive price discovery and truthful bidding in a practical online implementation.