We use theory and experiment to explore the performance of multi-stage, price-guided, combinatorial auctions. Dynamics in combinatorial auctions can help bidders to identify relevant packages and encourage losing bidders to bid to their limits. Our experiment compares a dynamic combinatorial mechanism to a simultaneous ascending auction. Unlike earlier experiments, we report not only comparativ...

Combinatorial auctions represent sophisticated market mechanisms that are becoming increasingly important in various business applications due to their ability to improve economic efficiency and auction revenue, especially in settings where participants tend to exhibit more complex user preferences and valuations. While recent studies on such auctions have found heterogeneity in bidder behavior...

Abstract Combinatorial auctions address the sale of materials where there exist complementarities between items. A major stumbling block to the widespread use of combinatorial auctions is the complexity of winner determination known to be NP-complete. We consider a rich version of combinatorial auctions, rule-based combinatorial auctions, where bids consist of rules that describe acceptable bun...

In this lecture, we will see applications of communication complexity to proving lower bounds for streaming algorithms. Towards the end of the lecture, we will introduce combinatorial auctions, and we will see applications of communication complexity to auctions in the next lecture. The references for this lecture include Lecture 7 of Troy Lee’s course on communication complexity [Lee10], Lectu...

Ascending price auctions typically involve a single price path with buyers paying their final bid price. Using this traditional definition, no ascending price auction can achieve the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) outcome for general private valuations in the combinatorial auction setting. We relax this definition by allowing discounts to buyers from the final price of the auction (or alternativel...

We study the computational power and limitations of iterative combinatorial auctions. Most existing iterative combinatorial auctions are based on repeatedly suggesting prices for bundles of items, and querying the bidders for their “demand” under these prices. We prove several results regarding such auctions that use a polynomial number of demand queries: (1) that such auctions can simulate sev...

Dominant-strategy truthfulness is traditionally considered the best possible solution concept in mechanism design, as it enables one to predict with confidence which strategies independent players will actually choose. Yet, as with any other form of equilibrium, it too can be extremely vulnerable to collusion. The problem of collusion is particularly evident for unrestricted combinatorial aucti...

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...