Designing revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions (CAs) is a recognized open problem in mechanism design. It is unsolved even for two bidders and two items for sale. Rather than attempting to characterize the optimal auction, we focus on designing approximations (suboptimal auction mechanisms which yield high revenue). Our approximations belong to the family of virtual valuations combinatoria...

We study anonymous posted price mechanisms for combinatorial auctions in a Bayesian framework. In a posted price mechanism, item prices are posted, then the consumers approach the seller sequentially in an arbitrary order, each purchasing her favorite bundle from among the unsold items at the posted prices. These mechanisms are simple, transparent and trivially dominant strategy incentive compa...

The existence of incentive-compatible, computationally-efficient protocols for combinatorial auctions with decent approximation ratios is one of the most central and well studied open questions in mechanism design. The only universal technique known for the design of truthful mechanisms is the celebrated Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) scheme, which is “maximal in range”, i.e., it always exactly op...

In recent years, Combinatorial Clock Auctions (CCAs) have been used around the world to allocate frequency spectrum for mobile telecom licenses. CCAs are claimed to significantly reduce the scope for gaming or strategic bidding. In this paper, we show, however, that CCAs significantly enhance the possibilities for strategic bidding. Real bidders in telecom markets are not only interested in the...

nal intervention are most effective, remain open questions. Overall, these volumes are a valuable resource for all researchers interested in studying civil wars. REFERENCES Collier, Paul and Anke Hoeffler. 1998. “On Economic Causes of Civil War.” Oxford Economic Papers, 50(4): 563–73. Collier, Paul and Anke Hoeffler. 2004. “Greed and Grievance in Civil War.” Oxford Economic Papers, 56(4): 563–9...

Making the “right” pricing decision in sales or procurement is a complex task. While the types of pricing policies/methods used in the exchange of goods and services vary greatly, we can divide these mechanisms under two broad categories: posted price mechanisms and price discovery mechanisms. Under a posted price mechanism, a good is sold at a take-it-or-leave-it price determined by the seller...

We investigate dominant-strategy auction mechanisms that, should a sufficiently informed coalition of players be present, exploit it so as to guarantee more efficiency and revenue than is otherwise possible. (Coming from a cryptographic tradition and prizing extreme settings, we refrain from relying on weaker notions of equilibrium; the availability of Bayesian information; any restrictions on ...

Super solutions provide a framework for finding robust solutions to Constraint Satisfaction Problems [5, 3]. We present a novel application of super solutions to combinatorial auctions in which a bid may be disqualified or withdrawn after the winners are announced. We examine the effectiveness of super solutions in different auction scenarios that simulate economically motivated bidding pattern...

We consider auctions in which the players have very limited knowledge about their own valuations. Specifically, the only information that a Knightian player i has about the profile of true valuations, θ∗, consists of a set of distributions, from one of which θ∗ i has been drawn. The VCG mechanism guarantees very high social welfare both in singleand multi-good auctions, so long as Knightian pla...