Leveraging Collusion In Combinatorial Auctions

We investigate dominant-strategy auction mechanisms that, should a sufficiently informed coalition of players be present, exploit it so as to guarantee more efficiency and revenue than is otherwise possible. (Coming from a cryptographic tradition and prizing extreme settings, we refrain from relying on weaker notions of equilibrium; the availability of Bayesian information; any restrictions on the number of players, goods, and colluders; or any restrictions on the type of valuations and the ability of the colluders.)