A Combinatorial Auction among Versatile Experts and Amateurs

Abstract

Auctions have become an integral part of electronic commerce and a promising field for applying multi-agent technologies. Correctly judging the quality of auctioned goods is often difficult for amateurs, in particular, in Internet auctions. However, experts can correctly judge the quality of goods. In this situation, it is difficult to make experts tell the truth and attain an efficient allocation, since experts have a clear advantage over amateurs and they would not reveal their valuable information without some reward. In our previous work, we have succeeded in developing such auction protocols under the following two cases: (1) the case of a single-unit auction among experts and amateurs, and (2) the case of a combinatorial auction among single-skilled experts and amateurs. In this paper, we focus on versatile experts. Versatile experts have an interest in, and expert knowledge on the qualities of several goods. In the case of versatile experts, there would be several problems, e.g., free riding problems, if we simply extended the previous VCG-style auction protocol. Thus, in this paper, we employ PORF (price-oriented, rationing-free) protocol for designing our new protocol to realize a strategy-proof auction protocol for experts. In the protocol, the dominant strategy for experts is truth-telling. Also, for amateurs, truth-telling is the best response when two or more experts select the dominant strategy. Furthermore, the protocol is false-name-proof.