Abstract
Combinatorial auctions are a common abstraction of many complex resource allocation problems: A large number of items (goods, resources) should be assigned to a number of agents (bidders) with different valuations on bundles of items. They are the central representative problem for the field of algorithmic mechanism design. In this field, algorithmic problems are studied in a game theoretic setting in which the input of the algorithm is not publicly known but distributed among a set of selfish agents which would possibly lie about their private information if this would give an advantage to them. A mechanism is called incentive compatible or truthful if it allocates the goods and sets payments for the bidders in such a way that it is a dominant strategy for each bidder to report his/her valuations for different bundles of items in a truthful manner.
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Vöcking, B. (2012). Randomized Mechanisms for Multi-unit Auctions. In: Czumaj, A., Mehlhorn, K., Pitts, A., Wattenhofer, R. (eds) Automata, Languages, and Programming. ICALP 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7392. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31585-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31585-5_6
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