This article proposes efficient solutions for the construction of sealed-bid second-price and combinatorial auction protocols in an active adversary setting. The main reason for constructing secure auction protocols is that the losing bids can be used in the future auctions as well as negotiations if they are not kept private. Our motivation is to apply verifiable secret sharing in order to con...

Motivated by the increasing use of auctions by government agencies, we consider the problem of fairly pricing public goods in a combinatorial auction. A well-known problem with the incentive-compatible Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction mechanism is that the resulting prices may not be in the core. Loosely speaking, this means the payments of the winners could be so low, that there are losing ...

The migration of auctions to the Internet provides a unique opportunity to harness the power of computing to create new auction forms that were previously impossible. We describe a new type of combinatorial auction that accepts rule-based bids. Allowing bids in the form of high-level rules relieves the buyer from the burden of enumerating all possible acceptable bundles. The allocation of goods...

We design a simple ascending Vickrey auction for the combinatorial allocation problem. We make use of a concept called universal competitive equilibrium (UCE) price to design our auction. Our auction searches for a UCE price, which (along with an efficient allocation) provides enough information to compute the Vickrey payments of buyers. Our auction maintains non-linear and non-anonymous prices...

In this paper, we present a preliminary idea about applying multi-unit combinatorial auctions to an electric power allocation problem when it includes sustainable power sources and it considers guaranteeing stable continuous use of the supplied power. Multi-unit combinatorial auction is a combinatorial auction that has some items that can bee seen as indistinguishable. Theoretically, such mecha...

In this paper, we present a preliminary idea about applying multi-unit combinatorial auctions to an electric power allocation problem when it includes sustainable power sources and it considers guaranteeing stable continuous use of the supplied power. Multi-unit combinatorial auction is a combinatorial auction that has some items that can bee seen as indistinguishable. Theoretically, such mecha...

AbstrAct This chapter focuses on a scheduling problem that considers various constraints as a complex real-world problem. Constraints on scheduling can be expressed as combinations of items (time slots) in a combinatorial auction. Agents bid for necessary combinations of time slots to satisfy users' preferences. We formalize a combinatorial auction for scheduling as an MIP (mixed integer progra...

We describe a discrete-time auction procedure called PAUSE (Progressive Adaptive User Selection Environment) for use in assigning COLR (Carrier of Last Resort) responsibility for universal service. The auction incorporates synergies by permitting all combinatorial bids, is transparent to the bidders, allows for multiple winners, and minimizes the possibility of bidder collusion. The procedure i...

An implicit assumption in truthful mechanism design is that revelation of one’s true type is always feasible. Indeed, this is not a problem in standard mechanism design setups, where it is up to the designer to determine the action spaces. However, this assumption fails to hold in many practical scenarios, where there are natural, exogenous constraints on the set of possible actions. For exampl...

Title of dissertation: EXPRESSING PREFERENCES WITH PRICE-VECTOR AGENTS IN COMBINATORIAL AUCTIONS Robert W. Day, Doctor of Philosophy, 2004 Dissertation directed by: Professor Subramanian Raghavan Decision and Information Technologies Department, The Robert H. Smith School of Business In this work, we investigate two combinatorial auction formats in which each bidding bidder may be represented b...