Auctions with Arbitrary Deals

To come to a deal, a bargaining process can sometimes take a long time. An auction may be a faster, but existing auction models cannot cope with situations where money is not an issue, or where it is difficult to express the utility of all participants in a monetary domain. We propose a modified Vickrey auction based only on preferences over the possible bids. This approach also allows for situations where a bid is not just a price or some fixed set of attributes, but can be any possible offer. We prove that in this flexible, generalized setting, the Vickrey mechanism is still incentive compatible and results in a Pareto-efficient solution.