research-article

Simple versus optimal mechanisms

Authors:

Jason D. Hartline,

Tim RoughgardenAuthors Info & Claims

EC '09: Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Electronic commerce

Pages 225 - 234

https://doi.org/10.1145/1566374.1566407

Published: 06 July 2009 Publication History

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Abstract

The monopolist's theory of optimal single-item auctions for agents with independent private values can be summarized by two statements. The first is from Myerson [8]: the optimal auction is Vickrey with a reserve price. The second is from Bulow and Klemperer [1]: it is better to recruit one more bidder and run the Vickrey auction than to run the optimal auction. These results hold for single-item auctions under the assumption that the agents' valuations are independently and identically drawn from a distribution that satisfies a natural (and prevalent) regularity condition.

These fundamental guarantees for the Vickrey auction fail to hold in general single-parameter agent mechanism design problems. We give precise (and weak) conditions under which approximate analogs of these two results hold, thereby demonstrating that simple mechanisms remain almost optimal in quite general single-parameter agent settings.

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Index Terms

Simple versus optimal mechanisms
1. Theory of computation

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Published In

EC '09: Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Electronic commerce

July 2009

376 pages

ISBN:9781605584584

DOI:10.1145/1566374

General Chair:
John Chuang
University of California at Berkeley, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Lance Fortnow
Northwestern University, USA
,
Pearl Pu
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

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Published: 06 July 2009

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July 6 - 10, 2009

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Overall Acceptance Rate 664 of 2,389 submissions, 28%

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Auricchio GZhang JZhang MDastani MSichman JAlechina NDignum V(2024)Extended Ranking Mechanisms for the m-Capacitated Facility Location Problem in Bayesian Mechanism DesignProceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems10.5555/3635637.3662855(87-95)Online publication date: 6-May-2024
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Procurement Bidding in First-Price and Second-Price, Sealed-Bid Auctionswithin the Common-Value Paradigm

Core-selecting auctions with incomplete information

Simple primal-dual auctions are not possible

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