Truthful Bidding Research Articles

A NEW PAYMENT RULE FOR CORE-SELECTING PACKAGE AUCTIONS

We propose a new, easy-to-implement class of payment rules, “Reference Rules” to make core-selecting package auctions more robust. Small, almost-riskless, profitable deviations from “truthful bidding” are often easy for bidders to find under currently used payment rules. Reference Rules perform better than existing rules on our marginal-incentive-to-deviate criterion, and are as robust as existing rules to large deviations. Other considerations, including fairness and comprehensibility, also support the use of Reference Rules.

A New Payment Rule for Core-Selecting Package Auctions

We propose a new, easy-to-implement, class of payment rules, Rules, to make core-selecting package auctions more robust. Small, almost riskless, profitable deviations from truthful bidding are often easy for bidders to find under currently-used payment rules. Reference Rules perform better than existing rules on our marginal-incentive-to-deviate criterion, and are as robust as existing rules to large deviations. Other considerations, including fairness and comprehensibility, also support the use of Reference Rules.

An options-based solution to the sequential auction problem

The sequential auction problem is commonplace in open, electronic marketplaces such as eBay. This is the problem where a buyer has no dominant strategy in bidding across multiple auctions when the buyer would have a simple, truth-revealing strategy if there was but a single auction event. Our model allows for multiple, distinct goods and market dynamics with buyers and sellers that arrive over time. Sellers each bring a single unit of a good to the market while buyers can have values on bundles of goods. We model each individual auction as a second-price (Vickrey) auction and propose an options-based, proxied solution to provide price and winner-determination coordination across auctions. While still allowing for temporally uncoordinated market participation, this options-based approach solves the sequential auction problem and provides truthful bidding as a weakly dominant strategy for buyers. An empirical study suggests that this coordination can enable a significant efficiency and revenue improvement over the current eBay market design, and highlights the effect on performance of complex buyer valuations (buyers with substitutes and complements valuations) and varying the market liquidity.

Characterization of bidding behavior in multi-unit auctions

This paper considers a very general class of single or multi-unit auctions of indivisible objects. The model allows for interdependent values, multidiminensional types and any attitude towards risk. Assuming only optimal behavior, we prove that each bid is chosen in order to equalize the marginal benefit to the marginal cost of bidding. This generalizes many existing results in the literature. We use this characterization to obtain sufficient conditions for truthful bidding, monotonic best reply strategies and identification results for multi-unit auctions.

Multi-item Vickrey–Dutch auctions

Descending price auctions are adopted for goods that must be sold quickly and in private values environments, for instance in flower, fish, and tobacco auctions. In this paper, we introduce efficient descending auctions for two environments: multiple non-identical items and buyers with unit-demand valuations; and multiple identical items and buyers with non-increasing marginal values. Our auctions are designed using the notion of universal competitive equilibrium (UCE) prices and they terminate with UCE prices, from which the Vickrey payments can be determined. For the unit-demand setting, our auction maintains linear and anonymous prices. For the homogeneous items setting, our auction maintains a single price and adopts Ausubel's notion of “clinching” to compute the final payments dynamically. The auctions support truthful bidding in an ex post Nash equilibrium and terminate with an efficient allocation. In simulation, we illustrate the speed and elicitation advantages of these auctions over their ascending price counterparts.

An assessment of four popular auction mechanisms in the siting of NIMBY facilities: some experimental evidence

The issue of locating locally unfriendly but socially beneficial facilities such as landfills and power stations is an important public policy concern in many countries. Local residents in the area where such facilities are to be located tend to exhibit strong opposition, no doubt due to the asymmetric distribution of the costs and benefits of such not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) facilities. A potentially useful mechanism for the siting of such facilities is by compensation auctions, which attempt to incorporate the market mechanism into the decision making process. In such auctions, communities name the compensation they require to host such facilities, and the community demanding the least amount of compensation gets to host the facility. This research attempts to evaluate the performance of such compensation auctions using laboratory exepriments. Four popular auction formats are evaluated: first- and second-price and all-pay first-and second-price sealed-bid auctions. The latter two formats correspond to the compensation auctions with penalty payments proposed by Kunreuther and Kleindorfer (1986) and Quah and Tan (1998), who claim that these auctions are more efficient as they restrains strategic (or over) bidding. Our results, however, contradict this claim. We show that the first-and second-price auctions without penalty payments are in fact more efficient, in that they tend to minimize social costs, and truthful bidding is more likely.

Allocation of Risk Capital on an Internal Market

We propose an allocation process for economic risk capital using an internal sequential auction in which investment allowances are based on marginal risk contributions. Division managers have incentive to give truthful bids because of bonus payments, which are linear in the division's profit and linked to the auction bids. With our model, the auction process reaches an equilibrium identical to the optimal allocation if division managers have no diverging interests. When division managers do have diverging preferences in terms of empire building, headquarters faces a trade-off between incurring opportunity costs for achieving a suboptimal allocation and bonus costs paid to division managers to overcome their diverging interests. However, bonus costs are partially offset by proceeds from the auction. Depending on the model parameters, total agency costs can become negative. We show that for large values of new risk capital to be allocated, headquarters can always choose a level of bonus payments so that total costs are negative.

Truthful Double Auction Mechanisms

Following the multistage design approach, we propose two asymptotically efficient truthful double auction mechanisms, the BC-LP mechanism and the MBC mechanism, for an exchange market with many buyers and sellers. In this market, each buyer wants to procure a bundle of commodities and each seller supplies one unit of a commodity. Furthermore, various transaction-related costs will be incurred when a buyer trades with a seller. We prove that under both mechanisms, truthful bidding is a dominant strategy for all buyers and sellers when the buyers' bundle information and the transaction cost information are common knowledge. The BC-LP mechanism can be implemented by just solving two linear programs, whereas the MBC mechanism has a higher complexity. The empirical study shows that the MBC mechanism achieves higher efficiency over the BC-LP mechanism and that both outperform the KSM-TR mechanism, the only known truthful mechanism for a more restrictive exchange market.

Make a guess: a robust mechanism for King Solomon’s dilemma

We introduce endogenous fees for participating in second-price auction which we use for a two-stage mechanism to solve King Solomon’s dilemma. They are positive for all agents. They are nonetheless shown to maintain the agents’ incentives for truthful bidding and guarantee participation by the highest-value agent. This feature of the endogenous fees is powerful enough for the efficient outcome to uniquely result from one round elimination of weakly dominated strategies, followed by at most four rounds of iterative elimination of strictly dominated stage-strategies. We provide an extension to cases with n agents and k identical prizes.

Vickrey–Dutch procurement auction for multiple items

We consider a setting where there is a manufacturer who wants to procure multiple items from a set of suppliers each of whom can supply one or more of these items (bundles). We design an ascending price auction for such a setting which implements the Vickrey–Clarke–Groves outcome and truthful bidding is an ex post Nash equilibrium. Our auction maintains non-linear and non-anonymous prices throughout the auction. This auction has a simple price adjustment step and is easy to implement in practice. As offshoots of this auction, we also suggest other simple auctions (in which truthful bidding is not an equilibrium by suppliers) which may be suitable where incentives to suppliers are not a big concern. Computer simulations of our auction show that it is scalable for the multi-unit case, and has better information revelation properties than its descending auction counterpart.

Ex-post full surplus extraction, straightforwardly

Consider an estimate of the common value of an auctioned asset that is symmetric in the bidders’ types. Such an estimate can be represented solely in terms of the order statistics of those types. This representation forms the basis for a pricing rule yielding truthful bidding as an equilibrium, whether bidders’ types are affiliated or independent. We highlight the link between the estimator and full surplus extraction, providing a necessary and sufficient condition for ex-post full surplus extraction, including the possibility of independent types. The results offer sharp insights into the strengths and limits of simple auctions by identifying the source of informational rents in such environments.

Designing Experimental Auctions for Marketing Research: The Effect of Values, Distributions, and Mechanisms on Incentives for Truthful Bidding

Accurately estimating consumer preferences for new products is an arduous task made difficult by the fact that individuals tend to exhibit a number of biases when answering hypothetical survey questions. Experimental auctions have advantages over conventional methods of estimating consumer preferences because they provide incentives for consumers to truthfully reveal their preferences. However, there is currently little information available to determine which mechanism to select among the class of incentive compatible mechanisms. In this paper, we provide insight into the theoretical properties of several incentive compatible value elicitation mechanisms including the Becker, DeGroot, Marschak (BDM) mechanism, Vickrey nth price auctions, and the random nth price auction. In particular, we draw attention to the shapes of the payoff functions and illustrate that the mechanisms differ with respect to the expected cost of deviating from truthful bidding. We show that incentives for truthful bidding depend on the distribution of competing bidders' values and/or prices and individuals' true values for a good. Our approach can be viewed as a diagnostic tool to aid in selecting between preference elicitation mechanisms.

Selling shares to retail investors: auction vs. fixed price

We analyze the problem of selling shares of a divisible good to a large number of buyers when demand is uncertain. We characterize equilibria of two popular mechanisms, a fixed price mechanism and a uniform price auction, and compare the revenues. While in the auction truthful bidding is a dominant strategy, we find that bidders have an incentive to overstate their demand in the fixed price mechanism. For some parameter values we find that the fixed price mechanism outperforms the auction.

Selling Shares to Retail Investors: Auction vs. Fixed Price

We analyze the problem of selling shares of a divisible good to a large number of buyers when demand is uncertain. We characterize equilibria of two popular mechanisms, a fixed price mechanism and a uniform price auction, and compare the revenues. While in the auction truthful bidding is a dominant strategy, we find that bidders have an incentive to overstate their demand in the fixed price mechanism. For some parameter values this yields the surprising result that the fixed price mechanism outperforms the auction.

An ascending price procurement auction for multiple items with unit supply

In this paper, a supply chain scenario is considered in which an original equipment manufacturer wishes to procure a set of items from a set of suppliers with private costs. Each supplier can provide at most one item. Two ascending price auctions are proposed to implement an efficient allocation for this model. The first converges to a unique competitive equilibrium price of the economy if suppliers bid truthfully. However, because no equilibrium strategy exists for the suppliers, a second auction is designed based on the first, which converges to a second unique competitive equilibrium price. Truthful bidding is a Bayesian Nash equilibrium strategy for suppliers in this auction. We show several practical advantages of our ascending auctions over traditional reverse auctions. Ascending auctions perform better than reverse auctions in two main aspects: (i) information revelation; and (ii) bidder cost determination. Simulation results are reported to validate these claims.

Security enforcement in wireless sensor networks: A framework based on non-cooperative games

This paper focuses on the design of security enforcement mechanisms for the prevention of denial of service (DoS) attacks in wireless sensor networks. In the first part, we identify the requirement for security enforcement using auction theory, which allows us to detect non-cooperative nodes. Our novel scheme for preventing DoS attacks is called Secure Auction based Routing (SAR). In the proposed protocol, nodes prefer to participate in forwarding incoming packets and gaining reputation in the network. Nodes willing to do so must compete against each other, and the competition is based on auction theory. The amount of bid that each node offers is equal to its utility value; and the price that a winner of a bid pays is a reduction in its original battery power. Since a node’s truthful bidding is shown to be a dominant strategy, in order to prevent DoS attack, nodes that do not bid truthfully should be isolated. In the second part, we formulate the attack–defense problem as a non-cooperative, two-player, non-zero-sum game between an attacker and a wireless sensor network. We show that this game achieves Nash equilibrium, thus leading to a defense strategy for the network. We propose two novel schemes. The first one is called Utility based Dynamic Source Routing (UDSR), which incorporates the total utility of each en-route node in data packets, where utility is the difference between gain and cost for each node. The second scheme is based on a watch-list, where each node earns a rating from its neighbors, based on its previous cooperation in the network. Simulation results show that the proposed game theoretic framework significantly increases the chance of success in defense strategy for the wireless sensor network.

Ascending price Vickrey auctions for general valuations

Ascending price auctions involving a single price path and buyers paying their final bid price cannot achieve the Vickrey–Clarke–Groves (VCG) outcome in the combinatorial auctions setting. Using a notion called universal competitive equilibrium prices, shown to be necessary and sufficient to achieve the VCG outcome using ascending price auctions, we define a class of ascending price auctions in which buyers bid on a single price path. Truthful bidding by buyers is an ex post Nash equilibrium in such auctions. By giving discounts to buyers from the final price, the VCG outcome is achieved for general valuations.

Ascending Price Vickrey Auctions for General Valuations

Ascending price auctions typically involve a single price path with buyers paying their final bid price. Using this traditional definition, no ascending price auction can achieve the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) outcome for general private valuations in the combinatorial auction setting. We relax this definition by allowing discounts to buyers from the final price of the auction (or alternatively, calculating the discounts dynamically during the auction) while still maintaining a single price path. Using a notion called universal competitive equilibrium prices, shown to be necessary and sufficient to achieve the VCG outcome using ascending price auctions, we define a broad class of ascending price combinatorial auctions in which truthful bidding by buyers is an ex post Nash equilibrium. Any auction in this class achieves the VCG outcome and ex post efficiency for general valuations. We define two specific auctions in this class by generalizing two known auctions in the literature [11, 24].

Simultaneous Independent Online Auctions with Discrete Bid Increments

Decentralized multi-item auctions offer great opportunities for integrating fragmented online auction markets into larger markets with more efficient outcomes. This paper extends the theory of multi-item ascending auctions of substitutes by considering any finite positive bid increment and allowing the bidders to bid asyn-chronously instead of bidding in a round-robin fashion. We consider a setup where the bidders' utilities over multiple items are additive and bound the maximum inefficiency in the allocation when the bidders follow a simple greedy strategy. We also obtain the limits within which the prices of individual items can vary from one outcome to another. For the special case of single unit bidder demand, we also bound the maximum surplus which a bidder can extract by unilaterally switching to some other strategy. The paper suggests an upper bound for the minimum required bid increment which would be necessary for competitive price discovery and truthful bidding in a practical online implementation.

Implementing the efficient auction: initial results from the lab

The efficient auction is designed to induce truthful bidding for bidders with affiliated values. Herein we implement the auction in the lab, and observe that inexperienced people can bid systematically in this more complex environment, albeit yielding a flatter bid function than the truthful.