In theory, combinatorial auctions can provide significant benefits in many real-world applications, such as truckload procurement. In practice, however, the use of such auctions has been greatly limited by the need for bidders to bid on an exponential number of bundles and for the auctioneer to solve an exponentially large winner-determination problem. We address these challenges for VCG combin...

Mixed Multi-Unit Combinatorial Auctions offer a high potential to be employed for the automated assembly of supply chains of agents offering goods and services. Their winner determination problem is an NP-hard problem that can be mapped into an integer program. Nonetheless, the computational cost of the current solution hinders the application of mixed multi-unit combinatorial auctions to reali...

We present a Lagrangian-based heuristic LAHA for the Winner Determination Problem in Combinatorial Auctions. The algorithm makes use of the market computing power by applying subgradient optimization with variable fixing. A number of different bid ordering and selection rules are used in our heuristic. Moreover, an effective local search refinement procedure is presented at the end of our algor...

Combinatorial auctions (CAs) have been studied by the multiagent systems community for some time, since these auctions are an effective mechanism for resource allocation when agents are self-interested. One challenge, however, is that the winner-determination problem (WDP) for combinatorial auctions is NP-hard in the general case. However, there are ways to leverage meaningful structure in the ...

Grid computing is a recent technology that has become extremely popular to optimize computing resources and manage data and computing workloads. In this paper, we present a parallel genetic algorithm improved by using a stochastic local search for solving the optimal winner determination problem (WDP) in combinatorial auctions. We give also a parallel implementation of the proposed approach on ...

Reverse Combinatorial auctions, that is, auctions where bidders can bid on the supply right of combinations of items, tend to lead to more efficient allocations than traditional auction mechanisms in multi-item auctions where the agents' valuations of the items are not additive. A common model is formulated for optimal the winner determination problem of reverse combinatorial auction. A PRIM (P...

We characterize the class of committee scoring rules that satisfy the fixed-majority criterion. In some sense, the committee scoring rules in this class are multiwinner analogues of the singlewinner Plurality rule, which is uniquely characterized as the only single-winner scoring rule that satisfies the simple majority criterion. We define top-k-counting committee scoring rules and show that th...

A major challenge in combinatorial auctions is to construct payment rules to make a winner-determination algorithm maximally incentive compatible. A general purpose solution is available only when winner case for reasons of computational complexity or other economic considerations. We propose to use structural SVMs for this pricing problem. The decision boundaries for each target class (with a ...