2 Truthful Games 3 Goldberg and Hartline (negative Result) 4 Randomized Auction

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...

Competitive auctions

We study a class of single-round, sealed-bid auctions for items in unlimited supply, such as digital goods. We introduce the notion of competitive auctions. A competitive auction is truthful (i.e., encourages buyers to bid their utility) and yields profit that is roughly within a constant factor of the profit of optimal fixed pricing for all inputs. We justify the use of optimal fixed pricing 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...

Truthful and Competitive Double Au tions

Averaging Techniques for Competitive Auctions

We study digital-goods auctions for items in unlimited supply introduced by Goldberg, Hartline and Wright. Since no deterministic algorithms are competitive for this class of auctions, one of the central research issues is how to obtain a nice probabilistic distribution over truthful algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a rather systematic approach to this goal: Consider for example the Samp...