In a Dutch auction, the price of an item decreases incrementally from the starting price at regular intervals. A bidder may buy the item at any time and stop the auction at the current price. This paper presents an optimal price decrement strategy in a Dutch auction, such that the expected revenue of the auction host is maximized. Properties of the optimal solution and a simple iterative soluti...

There are two types of market mechanism that can be used to allocate network resources efficiently based on users’ preference. One, mainly considered in previous works, is the Tâtonnement process; the allocation is not changed until the price reaches equilibrium. When the user preference changes dynamically, the resource allocation derived by the Tâtonnement process may not reflect the curent p...

This paper constructs a new data set from art auctions that include auctioneer presale price estimates to examine the credulity of art investors. While auction houses typically made no price estimates before 1973, they start providing highand lowprice estimates for all artworks thereafter. Thus, we have a natural experiment to observe changes in price behavior under the influence of auctioneer ...

Penny auction is an innovative, popular online auction format in which bidders are charged a small fee for placing each bid. A penny auction typically ends up with an extremely low final auction price, such that only one winning bidder can derive positive consumer surplus whereas other bidders lose out from the bidding costs. This makes it challenging to retain bidders who rarely win. Using a f...

In much of the existing literature on rent-seeking games, the outcome of the contest is either infinitely sensitive or relatively insensitive to contestants’ efforts. The current paper presents a family of contest games that permit characterization of equilibrium for all levels of sensitivity of the outcome to contestants’ efforts. Specifically, the outcome of the contest depends on the differe...

In this paper we extend the notion of multi-unit combinatorial reverse auction by adding a new dimension to the goods at auction. In such a new type of combinatorial auction a buyer can express substitutability relationships among goods: some goods can be substituted with others at a substitution cost. Substitutability relationships allow a buyer to introduce his uncertainty as to whether it is...

This paper examines economic resource allocation through a number of auction types for a grid of ewaste computers. It examines the time to complete tasks and the energy usage of completing the tasks on a grid. A model of a simulated grid is developed and used to evaluate the resource allocation mechanisms. The model is an agent-based simulation where by user agents submit tasks to node agents t...

W analyze a discrete clock auction with lowest-accepted-bid (LAB) pricing and provisional winners, as adopted by India for its 3G spectrum auction. In a perfect Bayesian equilibrium, the provisional winner shades her bid, whereas provisional losers do not. Such differential shading leads to inefficiency. An auction with highest-rejected-bid (HRB) pricing and exit bids is strategically simple, h...

The paper establishes that for an open and dense subset of smooth exchange economies, the number of Walrasian equilibria is finite. In particular, our results extend to non-regular economies; it even holds when restricted to the subset of critical ones. The proof rests on concepts from singularity theory.

In this paper we extend the notion of multi-unit combinatorial reverse auction by adding a new dimension to the goods at auction. In such a new type of combinatorial auction a buyer can express transformability relationships among goods: some goods can be transformed into others at a transformation cost. Transformability relationships allow a buyer to introduce his information as to whether it ...