Design, Analysis and Simulation of the Progressive Second Price Auction for Network Bandwidth Sharing
Abstract
We present the Progressive Second Price auction, a new decentralized mechanism for allocation of variable-size shares of a resource among multiple users. Unlike most mechanisms in the economics litterature, PSP is designed with a very small message space, making it suitable for real-time market pricing of communication bandwidth. Under elastic demand, the PSP auction is incentive compatible and stable, in that it has a ``truthful'' $\epsilon$-Nash equilibrium where all players bid at prices equal to their marginal valuation of the resource. PSP is efficient in that the equilibrium allocation maximizes total user value. The equilibrium holds when PSP is applied by independent resource controllers on each link of a network with arbitrary topology, with users having arbitrary but fixed routes. In the network case, the distributed mechanism has a further incentive compatibility in that submitting the same bid at all links along the route is an optimal strategy for each user, regardless of other players' actions. Using a prototype implementation of the auction game on the Internet, we investigate how convergence times scale with the number of bidders, as well as the trade-off between economic efficiency and signalling load. Finally, we provide a rate-distortion theoretic basis for valuation of bandwidth, which leads naturally to the elastic demand model that is assumed in the analysis of the mechanism.Download Info
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. 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.Bibliographic Info
Paper provided by EconWPA in its series Game Theory and Information with number 9809001.Length: 35 pages
Date of creation: 06 Sep 1998
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwpga:9809001
Note: Type of Document - Postscript (LaTeX); prepared on UNIX Sparc TeX; to print on PostScript; pages: 35 ; figures: included. Appeared in part at 8th ISDG, July 1998.
Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://128.118.178.162
Related research
Keywords: resource allocation; auctions; game theory; mechanism design; network pricing;Find related papers by JEL classification:
- C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-1998-10-02 (All new papers)
- NEP-GTH-1998-10-02 (Game Theory)
- NEP-MIC-1998-10-02 (Microeconomics)
References
No references listed on IDEASYou can help add them by filling out this form.
Citations
Lists
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.Statistics
Access and download statisticsCorrections
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwpga:9809001For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (EconWPA).
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.