We examine the effect of false-name bids on combinatorial auction protocols. Falsename bids are bids submitted by a single bidder using multiple identifiers such as multiple e-mail addresses. The obtained results are summarized as follows: 1) The Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism, which is strategy-proof and Pareto efficient when there exists no false-name bids, is not false-name-proof, 2) ...

We consider complexity issues for a special type of combinatorial auctions, the single-minded auction, where every agent is interested in only one subset of the commodities. First, we present a matching bound on the communication complexity for the single-minded auction under a general communication model. Next, we prove that it is NP-hard to decide whether Walrasian equilibrium exists in a sin...

Iterative auctions have many computational advantages over sealed-bid auctions, but can present new possibilities for strategic manipulation. We propose a two-stage technique to make iterative auctions that compute optimal allocations with myopic best-response bidding strategies more robust to manipulation. First, introduce proxy bidding agents to constrain bidding strategies to (possibly untru...

In Public Notice DA 00-1075, the Federal Communications Commission seeks further comment on modifying the simultaneous multiple round auction design to allow combinatorial (package) bidding. In particular, under II.A (Auction Design and Procedures; Simultaneously Multiple Round with Package Bidding), the question is asked as to whether the Commission should allow all possible packages composed ...

In this paper we propose auction algorithms for solving several types of assignment problems with inequality constraints. Included are asymmetric problems with different numbers of persons and objects, and multiassignment problems, where persons may be assigned to several objects and reversely. A central new idea in all these algorithms is to combine regular auction, where persons bid for objec...

Despite the large amounts of runtime needed to adequately solve a combinatorial auction (CA), existing iterative CA auction protocols require winner determination during every round of bid submissions. Using existing algorithms for winner determination will cause a timing bottleneck during the winner determination phase. Furthermore, there has recently been work which models the formation of su...

ITERATIVE COMBINATORIAL AUCTIONS: ACHIEVING ECONOMIC AND COMPUTATIONAL EFFICIENCY David Christopher Parkes Supervisor: Lyle H. Ungar A fundamental problem in building open distributed systems is to design mechanisms that compute optimal system-wide solutions despite the self-interest of individual users and computational agents. Classic game-theoretic solutions are often prohibitively expensive...