Minimal Preference Elicitation in Combinatorial Auctions

Combinatorial auctions (CAs) where bidders can bid on bundles of items can be very desirable market mechanisms when the items sold exhibit complementarity and/or substitutability, so the bidder’s valuations for bundles are not additive. However, in a basic CA, the bidders may need to bid on exponentially many bundles, leading to difficulties in determining those valuations, undesirable information revelation, and unnecessary communication. In this paper we present a design of an auctioneer agent that uses topological structure inherent in the problem to reduce the amount of information that it needs from the bidders. An analysis tool is presented as well as data structures for storing and optimally assimilating the information received from the bidders. Using this information, the agent then narrows down the set of desirable (welfare maximizing or Pareto efficient) allocations, and decides which questions to ask next. Several algorithms are presented that ask the bidders for value, order, and rank information.