We study the design of mechanisms in combinatorial auction domains. We focus on settings where the auction is repeated, motivated by auctions for licenses or advertising space. We consider models of agent behaviour in which they either apply common learning techniques to minimize the regret of their bidding strategies, or apply short-sighted best-response strategies. We ask: when can a black-bo...

We study a reverse auction in which a buyer procures a single unit of good or service (such as a contract) from one of many competing sellers through auctions. Sellers have independent and identically distributed costs. Under certain conditions, we show the multiplicity of the symmetric equilibrium bidding strategies in the first-price reverse auction, contrasting with the well-known uniqueness...

The Federal Communications Commission uses an ascending bid auction called the Simultaneous Multi-round Auction (SMA) to assign spectrum for personal communication service licenses. Congress recently mandated that the SMA be evaluated to determine if it could be modified to allow “combinatorial” bids for packages of licenses. We review the theoretical background and prior experimental evidence ...

The effects of preference revelation on allocational and Pareto efficiency are studied in a multi-attribute reverse English auction. Multi-attribute reverse auctions have been proposed as market institutions for electronic request for quotation buying processes. Preference revelation is a crucial question in multi-attribute reverse auctions in terms of the efficiency of auction outcomes. Result...

Combinatorial auctions are used for the efficient allocation of heterogeneous goods and services. They require appropriate software platforms providing automated winner determination and decision support for bidders. Several promising ascending combinatorial auction formats have been developed throughout the past few years based on primal-dual algorithms and linear programming theory. The Ascen...

Spectrum auction is an enabling technology for improving the spectrum efficiency of unused licensed bands (white spaces) in wireless networks. However, the back-room dealing (i.e., the frauds of the untrustworthy auctioneer and the bid-rigging between the greedy bidders and the insincere auctioneer) poses serious security challenges, leading to failures of all existing secure auction designs in...

Using mechanised reasoning we prove that combinatorial Vickrey auctions are soundly specified in that they associate a unique outcome (allocation and transfers) to any valid input (bids). Having done so, we auto-generate verified executable code from the formally defined auction. This removes a source of error in implementing the auction design. We intend to use formal methods to verify new auc...