Truthful and Competitive Double Au tions

Characterizing Truthful Market Design

This paper characterizes the family of truthful double-sided auctions. Despite the importance of double-sidedauctions to market design, to date no characterizationof truthful double-sided auctions was made. This pa-per characterizes truthful mechanisms for double-sidedauctions by generalizing Roberts classic result [29], toshow that truthful double-sided auctions must ”a...

Truthful and Competitive Double Auctions

In this paper we consider the problem of designing a mechanism for double auctions where bidders each bid to buy or sell one unit of a single commodity. We assume that each bidder’s utility value for the item is private to them and we focus on truthful mechanisms, ones where the bidders’ optimal strategy is to bid their true utility. The profit of the auctioneer is the difference between the to...

Decomposing Truthful and Competitive Online Double Auctions

In this paper, we study online double auctions, where multiple sellers and multiple buyers arrive and depart dynamically to exchange one commodity. We show that there is no deterministic online double auction that is truthful and competitive for maximising social welfare in an adversarial model. However, given the prior information that sellers are patient and the demand is not more than the su...

Competitive Analysis of In entive Compatible On-Line Au tions

A Lower Bound on the Competitive Ratio of Truthful Auctions

We study a class of single-round, sealed-bid auctions for a set of identical items. We adopt the worst case competitive framework defined by [1,2] that compares the profit of an auction to that of an optimal single price sale to at least two bidders. In this framework, we give a lower bound of 2.42 (an improvement from the bound of 2 given in [2]) on the competitive ratio of any truthful auctio...