A combinatorial auction is an auction where multiple items are for sale simultaneously to a set of buyers. Furthermore, buyers are allowed to place bids on subsets of the available items. This paper focuses on a combinatorial auction where a bidder can express his preferences by means of a so-called ordered matrix bid. Ordered matrix bids are a bidding language that allows a compact representation of a bidder''s preferences, and was developed by Day (2004). We give an overview of how a combinatorial auction with matrix bids works. We elaborate on the relevance of the matrix bid auction and we develop methods to verify whether a given matrix bid satisfies properties related to micro-economic theory as free disposal, subadditivity, submodularity and the gross substitutes property. Finally, we investigate how a collection of arbitrary bids can be represented as a matrix bid.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Maastricht : METEOR, Maastricht Research School of Economics of Technology and Organization in its series Research Memoranda with number
016.
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!]