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Verifying Dominant Strategy Equilibria in Auctions

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Multi-Agent Systems and Applications V (CEEMAS 2007)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 4696))

Abstract

Future agent mediated eCommerce will involve open systems of agents interoperating between different institutions, where different auction protocols may be in use. We argue that in order to achieve this agents will need a method to automatically verify the properties of a previously unseen auction protocol; for example, they may wish to verify that it is fair and robust to deception. We are therefore interested in the problem of automatically verifying the game-theoretic properties of a given auction mechanism, especially the property of strategyproofness. In this paper we show how the Alloy model checker can be used to automatically verify such properties. We illustrate the approach via two examples: a simple two player Vickrey auction and a quantity restricted multi-unit auction using the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing Science, King’s College, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3UE, Scotland

    Emmanuel M. Tadjouddine & Frank Guerin

Authors
  1. Emmanuel M. Tadjouddine
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  2. Frank Guerin
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Editor information

Hans-Dieter Burkhard Gabriela Lindemann Rineke Verbrugge László Zsolt Varga

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Tadjouddine, E.M., Guerin, F. (2007). Verifying Dominant Strategy Equilibria in Auctions. In: Burkhard, HD., Lindemann, G., Verbrugge, R., Varga, L.Z. (eds) Multi-Agent Systems and Applications V. CEEMAS 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4696. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75254-7_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75254-7_29

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-75253-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-75254-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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