Abstract
We address the fundamental issue of revenue and efficiency in the combinatorial and simultaneous auction using a novel approach. Specifically, upper and lower bounds are constructed for the first-price sealed-bid setting of these two auctions.
The question of revenue is important yet very few results can be found in the literature. Only for very small instances with 2 items have comparisons been made. Krishna et al. find that allowing combinatorial bids result in lower revenue compared to a second price simultaneous auction.
We formulate a lower bound on the first-price combinatorial auction and an upper bound on the first-price simultaneous auction in a model where bidders have synergies from winning a specific set of items. With these bounds, we can (i) prove that asymptotically as the number of bidders increase, the combinatorial auction will be revenue-superior, and (ii) present a number of concrete examples where combinatorial auctions give higher expected revenue.
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References
Gian, F.G., Albano, L., Lovo, S.: A comparison of standard multi-unit auctions with synergies. Economics Letters 71(1), 55–60 (2001)
Krishna, V., Rosenthal, R.W.: Simultaneous auctions with synergies. Games and Economic Behavior 17(1), 1–31 (1996)
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© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Andersson, A., Wilenius, J. (2009). A New Analysis of Expected Revenue. In: Nielsen, M., Kučera, A., Miltersen, P.B., Palamidessi, C., Tůma, P., Valencia, F. (eds) SOFSEM 2009: Theory and Practice of Computer Science. SOFSEM 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5404. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-95891-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-95891-8_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-95890-1
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