An Auction Reference Model for Describing and Running Auctions

With electronic auctions gaining importance, economists have increasingly gotten interested in researching the impact of variations in auction protocols. However, the infinite number of possible auction configurations and the significance of details make this a hard and tedious task. Therefore we address the issue of comprehensive description both from a conceptual and an implementation perspective. Central components that we identify serve as building blocks for an Auction Reference Model. We show how the components of the Auction Reference Model can be described in order to achieve an overall auction specification and how the descriptions are operationalized by a generic auction runtime engine.