bluffer ’ s guide to auctions

There is a veritable menagerie of auctions—single dimensional, multidimensional, single sided, double sided, first price, second price, English, Dutch, Japanese, sealed bid—and these have been extensively discussed and analysed in the economics literature. the main purpose of this paper is to survey this literature from a computer science perspective, primarily from the viewpoint of computer scientists who are interested in auction theory. However, we also look at some attempts from the computer science literature to identify the important properties of auctions from the perspective of implementing auction systems.