Flexible double auctions for electronic commerce: theory and implementation

Abstract We consider a general family of auction mechanisms that admit multiple buyers and sellers, and determine market-clearing prices. We analyze the economic incentives facing participants in such auctions, demonstrating that, under some conditions, it is possible to induce truthful revelation of values by buyers or sellers, but not both, and for single- but not multi-unit bids. We also perform a computational analysis of the auctioneer's task, exhibiting efficient algorithms for processing bids and calculating allocations.

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

[2]  Stephen J. Rassenti,et al.  Auction Institutional Design: Theory and Behavior of Simultaneous Multiple Unit Generalizations of the Dutch and English Auctions , 1990 .

[3]  Michael P. Wellman,et al.  The Michigan Internet AuctionBot: a configurable auction server for human and software agents , 1998, AGENTS '98.

[4]  Paul R. Milgrom,et al.  Auctions and Bidding: A Primer , 1989 .

[5]  Michael P. Wellman,et al.  Some economics of market-based distributed scheduling , 1998, Proceedings. 18th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (Cat. No.98CB36183).

[6]  A. Gibbard.  Manipulation of Voting Schemes: A General Result , 1973 .

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

[8]  E. H. Clarke.  Multipart pricing of public goods , 1971 .

[9]  Steven R. Williams,et al.  Bilateral trade with the sealed bid k-double auction: Existence and efficiency , 1989 .

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

[11]  Hal R. Varian,et al.  Economic Mechanism Design for Computerized Agents , 1995, USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce.

[12]  Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason,et al.  Generalized Vickrey Auctions , 1994 .

[13]  Oren Etzioni,et al.  A scalable comparison-shopping agent for the World-Wide Web , 1997, AGENTS '97.

[14]  M. Satterthwaite,et al.  Efficient Mechanisms for Bilateral Trading , 1983 .

[15]  Stephen J. Rassenti,et al.  Designing a Uniform-Price Double Auction: An Experimental Evaluation , 1993 .

[16]  Theodore Groves,et al.  Incentives in Teams , 1973 .

[17]  Arne Andersson,et al.  Managing large scale computational markets , 1998, Proceedings of the Thirty-First Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[18]  Paul R. Milgrom,et al.  A theory of auctions and competitive bidding , 1982 .