On the efficiency of sequential auctions for spectrum sharing

Abstract

In previous work we have studied the use of sequential second price auctions for sharing a wireless resource, such as bandwidth or power. The resource is assumed to be managed by a spectrum broker (auctioneer), who collects bids and allocates discrete units of the resource. It is well known that a second price auction for a single indivisible good has an efficient dominant strategy equilibrium; this is no longer the case when multiple units of a homogeneous good are sold in repeated iterations. Previous work attempted to bound this inefficiency loss for two users with non-increasing marginal valuations and full information. This work was based on studying a setting in which one agent's valuation for each resource unit is strictly larger than any of the other agent's valuations and assuming a certain property of the price paid by such a dominant user in any sub-game. Using this assumption it was shown that the worst-case efficiency loss was no more than e−1. However, here we show that this assumption is not satisfied for all non-increasing marginals with this dominance property. In spite of this, we show that it is always true for the worst-case marginals for any number of goods and so the worst-case efficiency loss for any non-increasing marginal valuations is still bounded by e−1