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AAAI
2004

Methods for Boosting Revenue in Combinatorial Auctions

13 years 11 months ago
Methods for Boosting Revenue in Combinatorial Auctions
We study the recognized open problem of designing revenuemaximizing combinatorial auctions. It is unsolved even for two bidders and two items for sale. Rather than pursuing the pure economic approach of attempting to characterize the optimal auction, we explore techniques for automatically modifying existing mechanisms in a way that increase expected revenue. We introduce a general family of auctions, based on bidder weighting and allocation boosting, which we call virtual valuations combinatorial auctions (VVCA). All auctions in the family are based on the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism, executed on virtual valuations that are linear transformations of the bidders' real valuations. The restriction to linear transformations is motivated by incentive compatibility. The auction family is parameterized by the coefficients in the linear transformations. The problem of designing a high revenue mechanism is therefore reduced to search in the parameter space of VVCA. We analyze t...
Anton Likhodedov, Tuomas Sandholm
Added 30 Oct 2010
Updated 30 Oct 2010
Type Conference
Year 2004
Where AAAI
Authors Anton Likhodedov, Tuomas Sandholm
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