Combinatorial clock auctions: Price direction and performance

Combinatorial Clock Auctions: Price Direction and Performance

This paper addresses three concerns with ascending price Combinatorial Clock Auctions (CCAs); price guidance toward efficiency relevant packages, computational burden, and susceptibility to collusive bidding. We propose a descending price Combinatorial Clock Auction (DCCA) with a newly devised pricing strategy to alleviate all of these concerns. Mimicking bidding behavior of human subjects foun...

Price Distortions in Combinatorial Clock Auctions, a Theoretical Perspective

Cryptographic Combinatorial Clock-Proxy Auctions

We present a cryptographic protocol for conducting efficient, provably-correct and secrecy-preserving combinatorial clock-proxy auctions. The “clock phase” functions as a trusted auction despite price discovery: bidders submit encrypted bids, and prove for themselves that they meet activity rules, and can compute total demand and thus verify price increases without revealing any information abo...

Gaming in Combinatorial Clock Auctions

In recent years, Combinatorial Clock Auctions (CCAs) have been used around the world to allocate frequency spectrum for mobile telecom licenses. CCAs are claimed to significantly reduce the scope for gaming or strategic bidding. In this paper, we show, however, that CCAs significantly enhance the possibilities for strategic bidding. Real bidders in telecom markets are not only interested in the...

An Experimental Comparison of Linear and Nonlinear Price Combinatorial Auctions

Combinatorial auctions are used for the efficient allocation of heterogeneous goods and services. They require appropriate software platforms providing automated winner determination and decision support for bidders. Several promising ascending combinatorial auction formats have been developed throughout the past few years based on primal-dual algorithms and linear programming theory. The Ascen...