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AAAI
2010

Asymmetric Spite in Auctions

13 years 5 months ago
Asymmetric Spite in Auctions
In many auctions, agents bid more aggressively than selfinterest would prescribe. This can be explained by spite, where the agent's utility not only increases in the agent's surplus but also decreases as the other bidders' surpluses increase. Spite can stem from long-term benefits from making competitors worse off and from inherent psychological effects. There have been important recent game-theoretic analyses of spiteful bidding assuming all agents are equally spiteful. We present, to our knowledge, the first auction analysis in the more realistic setting where bidders may be spiteful to different extents. We show that the equilibrium bidding function can still be written in the same form--except that the spite factor is replaced by an `expressed' spite factor. This leads to bidders expressing spites that are higher or lower than their true spite depending on others' spite. Perhaps surprisingly, in the two-bidder case, the mapping from true spite to expressed...
Ankit Sharma, Tuomas Sandholm
Added 29 Oct 2010
Updated 29 Oct 2010
Type Conference
Year 2010
Where AAAI
Authors Ankit Sharma, Tuomas Sandholm
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