Advancements in information technology offer opportunities for designing and deploying innovative market mechanisms that can improve the allocation and procurement processes of businesses. For example, combinatorial auctions – in which bidders can bid on combinations of goods – have been shown to increase the economic efficiency of a trade when goods have complementarities. However, the lack of...

Combinatorial auctions are promising auction formats for industrial and public procurement. Potential advantages of using combinatorial auctions include lower overall spend, low transaction costs for multi-item negotiations, fairness and market transparency for suppliers, as well as high allocative efficiency. A number of fundamental design considerations are relevant to the application of comb...

Online group-buying is one of the most innovative business models employed by many companies. From the perspective of buyers, quantity based discounts provide a huge incentive to form coalitions and take advantage of lower prices without ordering more than their actual demand. Traditional group-buying mechanisms are usually based on a single item and uniform cost sharing. One way to reduce the ...

The use of electronic auctions as a means of trading goods has increased year after year. eBay has gone from half a million registered users in 1998 to 88 million today. Businesses have also shown interest in using auctions. However, the traditional single good auction as used by eBay lacks the required ability to express dependencies between goods in complex procurement auctions leading to ris...

M auctions involve selling several distinct items simultaneously, where bidders can bid on the whole or any part of the lot. Such auctions are referred to as combinatorial auctions. Examples of such auctions include truck delivery routes, industrial procurement, and FCC spectrum. Determining winners in such auctions is an NP-hard problem, and significant research is being conducted in this area...

The word “auction” generally refers to a mechanism for allocating one or more resources to one or more parties (or bidders). Generally, once the allocation is determined, some amount of money changes hands; the precise monetary transfers are determined by the auction process. While in some auction protocols, such as the English auction, bidders repeatedly increase their bids in an attempt to ou...