Abstract
The increased use of online market places (like eBay) by professional traders and small businesses goes along with an increase in demand for online multi-unit auction designs. A seller with many objects for sale might consider it inconvenient to initiate and monitor a single auction for each individual item and thus might favour the use of a multi-unit auction. However, the design of online multi-unit auctions can be sub-stantially more difficult than that of single-unit auctions. In fact, the theoretical as well as empirical literature on multi-unit auctions is much less developed. New difficulties such as market power and computational complexities arise when objects are heterogeneous or bidders demand multiple items. In addition, there is a conflict between simplicity of auction rules and their efficiency (and revenue). If objects for sale are complements, to obtain the optimal performance (at least from a theoretical point of view) the auction design usually requires that bidders specify their preferences on any possible package of the N objects. Thus each bidder has to submit 2N-1 numbers (as he might value any subset of the items for sale differently). Especially for a large number of objects such an auction is often infeasible.
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