Abstract:

We embark on a systematic analysis of the power and limitations of iterative ascending-price combinatorial auctions. We prove a large number of results showing the boundaries of what can be achieved by different types of ascending auctions: item prices vs. bundle prices, anonymous prices vs. personalized prices, deterministic vs. non-deterministic, ascending vs. descending, preference elicitation vs. full elicitation, adaptive vs. non-adaptive, and single trajectory vs. multi trajectory. Two of our main results show that neither ascending item-price auctions nor ascending anonymous bundle-price auctions can determine the optimal allocation among general valuations. This justifies the use of personalized bundle prices in iterative combinatorial auctions like the FCC spectrum auctions.

Website