An Elementary Introduction to Auctions

This paper introduces the questions an auction designer must face and the different academic disciplines that have had something to say about auctions. The first part of the paper discuses the questions that someone deciding to hold an auction must answer, points out their possible significance, and mentions some of the kinds of answers that have been used. The second part of the paper describes the history of the academic disciplines that have studied auctions and the kinds of concerns and approaches that they have used.

[1]  L. Friedman,et al.  Competitive bidding strategies , 1987 .

[2]  David Joseph Wood.  A study of multiplicative-strategy equilibria in second-price multicomponent auctions , 1989 .

[3]  Marshall Rose,et al.  Comment on Multi-Object Auctions: Sequential vs. Simultaneous Sales , 1986 .

[4]  A. Roth,et al.  Last Minute Bidding and the Rules for Ending Second-Price Auctions: Theory and Evidence from a Natural Experiment on the Internet , 2000 .

[5]  L. Friedman.  A Competitive-Bidding Strategy , 1956 .

[6]  Edmund H. Durfee,et al.  An adaptive agent bidding strategy based on stochastic modeling , 1999, AGENTS '99.

[7]  Shmuel S. Oren,et al.  Optimal Bidding in Sequential Auctions , 1975, Oper. Res..

[8]  Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason,et al.  Pricing the Internet , 1995 .

[9]  James E. Diekmann,et al.  Coping with Uncertainty in Unit Price Contracting , 1982 .

[10]  R. McAfee,et al.  Auctions and Bidding , 1986 .

[11]  M. Rothkopf,et al.  Why Are Vickrey Auctions Rare? , 1990, Journal of Political Economy.

[12]  J. Banks,et al.  Allocating uncertain and unresponsive resources: an experimental approach. , 1989, The Rand journal of economics.

[13]  Ronald M. Harstad,et al.  Modeling Competitive Bidding: A Critical Essay , 1994 .

[14]  Martin Shubik.  On Different Methods for Allocating Resources , 1970 .

[15]  Robert M. Stark,et al.  Competitive Bidding: A Comprehensive Bibliography , 1971, Oper. Res..

[16]  C. W. Smith.  Auctions: The Social Construction of Value , 1989 .

[17]  Fredrik Ygge,et al.  Market-Oriented Programming and its Application to Power Load Management , 1998 .

[18]  M. Rothkopf.  On Auctions with Withdrawable Winning Bids , 1991 .

[19]  Ronald M. Harstad,et al.  Computationally Manageable Combinational Auctions , 1998 .

[20]  Dave Cliff,et al.  Genetic optimization of adaptive trading agents for double-auction markets , 1998, Proceedings of the IEEE/IAFE/INFORMS 1998 Conference on Computational Intelligence for Financial Engineering (CIFEr) (Cat. No.98TH8367).

[21]  P. Klemperer.  The Economic Theory of Auctions , 2000 .

[22]  Oil Resources: Who Gets What How? , 1976 .

[23]  James E. Hanson,et al.  Price-war dynamics in a free-market economy of software agents , 1998 .

[24]  Edmund H. Durfee,et al.  A Rigorous, Operational Formalization of Recursive Modeling , 1995, ICMAS.

[25]  Michael H. Rothkopf,et al.  Innovative approaches to competitive mineral leasing , 1992 .

[26]  Michael H. Rothkopf,et al.  Withdrawable Bids as Winner's Curse Insurance , 1995, Oper. Res..

[27]  William Vickrey,et al.  Counterspeculation, Auctions, And Competitive Sealed Tenders , 1961 .

[28]  Edmund H. Durfee,et al.  Computational agents that learn about agents: Algorithms for their design and a predictive theory of their behavior , 1998 .

[29]  Michael P. Wellman.  A Market-Oriented Programming Environment and its Application to Distributed Multicommodity Flow Problems , 1993, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[30]  P. Klemperer.  Auction Theory: A Guide to the Literature , 1999 .

[31]  Tracy Mullen,et al.  Experiments in designing computational economies for mobile users , 1998, ICE '98.

[32]  J. Kagel,et al.  The Winner's Curse and Public Information in Common Value Auctions: Comment , 1999 .

[33]  R. Cassady.  Auctions and Auctioneering , 2023 .

[34]  David Lucking-Reiley,et al.  Using field experiments to test equivalence between auction formats: Magic on the internet , 1999 .

[35]  Michael H. Rothkopf,et al.  Two Models of Bid-Taker Cheating in Vickrey Auctions , 1995 .

[36]  Hiroaki Kikuchi,et al.  Multi-round Anonymous Auction Protocols , 1999 .

[37]  Matthew K. Franklin,et al.  The design and implementation of a secure auction service , 1995, Proceedings 1995 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.