When rational, utility-maximizing agents encounter an opportunity to collaborate on a group activity, they must determine whether to commit to that activity. We refer to this problem as the initial-commitment decision problem (ICDP). This paper describes a mechanism that agents may use to solve the ICDP. The mechanism is based on a combinatorial auction in which agents bid on sets of roles in t...

Combinatorial auctions are employed into many applications such as spectrum auctions held by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). A crucial problem in such auctions is the lack of secure and efficiency mechanism to protect the privacy of the bidding prices and to ensure data security. To solve the problem, we propose an approach to represent the price as a polynomial’s degree based on v...

This paper presents and compares three heuristics for the combinatorial auction problem. Besides a simple greedy (SG) mechanism, two metaheuristics, a simulated annealing (SA), and a genetic algorithm (GA) approach are developed which use the combinatorial auction process to find an allocation with maximal revenue for the auctioneer. The performance of these three heuristics is evaluated in the...

Available online 24 December 2008

C AUCTIONS are a great way to represent and solve distributed allocation problems. Unfortunately, most of the winner determination solutions that exists are centralized. They require all agents to send their bids to a centralized auctioneer who then determines the winners. The PAUSE auction, in contrast, is an increasing-price combinatorial auction in which the problem of winner determination i...

Auctions are the most widely used strategic gametheoretic mechanism in the Internet. Auctions have been mostly studied from a game-theoretic and economic perspective, although recent work in AI and OR has been concerned with computational aspects of auctions as well. When faced from a computational perspective, combinatorial auctions are perhaps the most challenging type of auctions. Combinator...

This chapter concerns the issue of the representation of bids in combinatorial auctions. Theoretically speaking, bids are simply abstract elements drawn from some space of strategies defined by the auction. Every implementation of a combinatorial auction (and, in fact, every other game) must define how each possible bid is actually represented using the underlying communication technology. As t...

Auction models are found efficient in managing resources allocation, which is a key technology in grid computing system. In this paper, a new reverse auction approach is proposed, and its mechanism and related auction algorithm are designed. In our approach, the grid trading service, i.e., an intelligent entity, uses this auction algorithm to estimate the resource user’s satisfaction degree and...