Lok,Reinder B. Romero Morales,Dolores Vermeulen,Dries (METEOR)
Abstract
The VCG mechanism has some nice properties if the agents-are-substitutes property holds.For example, for combinatorial auctions the property assures that the VCG mechanism is supported by a pricing equilibrium. The existence of such a pricing equilibrium is a necessary condition for the existence of ascending auctions that are equivalent to the VCG mechanism.Although it is known that the agents-are-substitutes property is important in several settings few problems or subclasses of problems are proven to have the property.In this paper we show for a class of problems that the agents-are-substitutes property holds. Moreover we give two rather natural and small extensions that do not have this property in general.Furthermore we show that in our simple problem class we need the possibility of price discrimination.
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Publisher Info
Paper provided by Maastricht : METEOR, Maastricht Research School of Economics of Technology and Organization in its series Research Memoranda with number
008.
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.:
Peter Cramton & Yoav Shoham & Richard Steinberg, 2004.
"Combinatorial Auctions,"
Papers of Peter Cramton
04mit, University of Maryland, Department of Economics - Peter Cramton, revised 2004.
[Downloadable!]
Peter Cramton, 1998.
"Ascending Auctions,"
Papers of Peter Cramton
98eer, University of Maryland, Department of Economics - Peter Cramton, revised 28 Jul 1998.
[Downloadable!]