Approximately Envy-Free Spectrum Allocation with Complementarities

With spectrum auctions as our prime motivation, in this paper we analyze combinatorial auctions where agents’ valuations exhibit complementarities. Assuming that the agents only value bundles of size at most k and also assuming that we can assess prices, we present a mechanism that is efficient, approximately envy-free, asymptotically strategy-proof and that has polynomial-time complexity. Modifying an iterative rounding procedure from assignment problems, we use the primal and dual optimal solutions to the linear programming relaxation of the auction problem to construct a lottery for the allocations and to assess the prices to bundles. The allocations in the lottery over-allocate goods by at most k−1 units, and the dual prices are shown to be (approximately) envy-free irrespective of the allocation chosen. We conclude with a detailed numerical investigation of a specific spectrum allocation problem.