Combinatorial auctions are promising auction formats for industrial and public procurement. Potential advantages of using combinatorial auctions include lower overall spend, low transaction costs for multi-item negotiations, fairness and market transparency for suppliers, as well as high allocative efficiency. A number of fundamental design considerations are relevant to the application of comb...

A simple characterization of the equilibrium conditions required to compute Vickrey payments in the Combinatorial Allocation Problem leads to an ascending price Generalized Vickrey Auction. The ascending auction, iBundle Extend & Adjust (iBEA), maintains non-linear and perhaps non-anonymous prices on bundles of items, and terminates with the efficient allocation and the Vickrey payments in ex p...

This paper proposes a mapping between multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) and combinatorial auctions (CAs). In MAPF, agents need to reach their goal destinations without colliding. Algorithms for solving MAPF aim at assigning agents non-conflicting paths that minimize agents’ travel costs. In CA problems, agents bid over bundles of items they desire. Auction mechanisms aim at finding an allocation o...

Transportation service procurement auctions are typically characterized by limited number of rounds and low profit margin. In this paper we address the bid determination problem for single-lane and combinatorial bids in the successive rounds of an auction, which maximizes the profit and also ensures winning. A profit factor (PF) is computed at each round using the industry average price for thi...

We survey experimental research on multi-unit auctions with an emphasis on topics that may be of a unifying interest to experimental, as well as theoretical and empirical economists. Topics include static and dynamic multi-unit auctions; combinatorial auctions and efficient auction design; simultaneous and sequential auctions; bidder asymmetry and endogenous entry, and collusion in auctions. We...