Truthful Auctions with Optimal Profit
نویسندگان
چکیده
We study the design of truthful auction mechanisms for maximizing the seller’s profit. We focus on the case when the auction mechanism does not have any knowledge of bidders’ valuations, especially of their upper bound. For the Single-Item auction, we obtain an “asymptotically” optimal scheme: for any k ∈ Z and ǫ > 0, we give a randomized truthful auction that guarantees an expected profit of Ω( OPT lnOPT ln lnOPT ···(ln(k) OPT )1+ǫ ), where OPT is the maximum social utility of the auction. Moreover, we show that no truthful auction can guarantee an expected profit of Ω( OPT lnOPT ln lnOPT ··· ln(k) OPT ). In addition, we extend our results and techniques to Multi-units auction, Unit-Demand auction, and Combinatorial auction.
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