Auction algorithms for market equilibrium with weak gross substitute demands and their applications

Abstract

We consider the Arrow-Debreu exchange market model where agents' demands satisfy the weak gross substitutes (WGS) property. This is a well-studied property, in particular, it gives a sufficient condition for the convergence of the classical tâtonnement dynamics. In this paper, we present a simple auction algorithm that obtains an approximate market equilibrium for WGS demands. Such auction algorithms have been previously known for restricted classes of WGS demands only. As an application of our technique, we obtain an efficient algorithm to find an approximate spending-restricted market equilibrium for WGS demands, a model that has been recently introduced as a continuous relaxation of the Nash social welfare (NSW) problem. This leads to a polynomial-time constant factor approximation algorithm for NSW with budget separable piecewise linear utility functions; only a pseudopolynomial approximation algorithm was known for this setting previously.