A number of heterogeneous items are to be sold to several bidders. Each bidder demands at most one item. The price of each item is not completely flexible and is restricted to some admissible interval. In such a market economy with price rigidities, a Walrasian equilibrium usually fails to exist. To facilitate the allocation of items to the bidders, we propose an ascending auction with rationing that yields a constrained Walrasian equilibrium outcome. The auctioneer starts with the lower bound price vector that specifies the lowest admissible price for each item, and each bidder responds with a set of items demanded at those prices. The auctioneer adjusts prices upwards for a minimal set of over-demanded items and chooses randomly a winning bidder for any item if the item is demanded by several bidders and its price has reached its highest admissible price. We prove that the auction finds a constrained Walrasian equilibrium outcome in a finite number of steps.
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Paper provided by Tilburg University, Center for Economic Research in its series Discussion Paper with number
2007-26.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Roth, Alvin E. & Sotomayor, Marilda, 1992.
"Two-sided matching,"
Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications,
in: R.J. Aumann & S. Hart (ed.), Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 16, pages 485-541
Elsevier.
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