Internet-based online auctions provide unprecedented opportunities for sellers to submit shill bids. Shill bidding increases the seller’s expected utility but deceives buyers and damages auctioneers’ reputation. Because the anonymity of the Internet makes it difficult to catch shill bidders through statistical analysis or encryption, we suggest that the most effective approach is to make it une...

We are interested in mechanisms that maximize social welfare. In [1] this problem was studied for multi-unit auctions with unit demand bidders and for the public project problem, and in each case social welfare undominated mechanisms in the class of feasible and incentive compatible mechanisms were identified. One way to improve upon these optimality results is by allowing the players to move s...

This paper proves that the monotonicity of bidding strategies together with the rationality of bidders implies that the winning bid in a first price auction converges to the competitive equilibrium price as the number of bidders increases (Wilson (1977)). Instead of analyzing the symmetric Nash equilibrium, we examine rationalizable strategies (Bernheim (1984) and Pearce (1984)) among the set o...

Successful privatization in other sectors leads to a restructuring the power sector. The same practice has been adopted electrical industry with deregulated electricity market (EM). This enables competition among generating companies (Genco’s) for maximizing their profit and it plays central role. With this aim, each Genco gives higher bid that may result risk of losing opportunity get selected...

A b s t r a c t Pay per click (PPC) auctions are used to sell positions in search engines. These auctions have gained increasing commercial importance , and many companies offer software to bid on these auctions. We present a trading agent for PPC auctions that is the first in our knowledge to use an explicit profit objective function. The agent creates a look-ahead plan of its desired bids, wh...

Combinatorial auctions, where bidders are allowed to submit bids for bundles of items, are preferred to single-item auctions when bidders have complementarities and substitutabilities among items and therefore achieve better social efficiency. A large unexplored area of research is the design of bidding strategies. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive bidding strategy for combinatorial auct...

Virtual power plant (VPP) can be studied to investigate how energy is purchased or sold in the presence of electricity market price uncertainty. The VPP uses different intermittent distributed sources such as wind turbine, flexible loads, and locational marginal prices (LMPs) in order to obtain profit. VPP should propose bidding/offering curves to buy/sell from/to day-ahead market. In this pape...

Online auctions are arguably one of the most important and distinctly new applications of the Internet. The predominant player in online auctions, eBay, has over 42 million users, and it was the host of over $9.3 billion worth of goods sold just in the year 2001. Using methods from approximate dynamic programming and integer programming, we design algorithms for optimally bidding for a single i...

Water emission trading (WET) is promising in sustainable development strategy. However, low participation impedes its development. We develop an evolutionary game model of two enterprise populations’ dynamics and stability in the decision-making behavior process. Due to the different perceived value of certain permits, enterprises choose strategy (bidding for permit) or strategy (not bidding). ...

Shill bidding is the act of using bids in an online auction to drive up the final price for the seller, thereby defrauding legitimate bidders. While ‘shilling’ is recognized as a problem and shill bidding is strictly forbidden in online auctions, presently there is little to no established means of defense against shills. This paper presents a software bidding agent that follows a shill bidding...