Auctions with Heterogeneous Items and Budget Limits

Auctions with Heterogeneous Items and Budget Limits

Abstract

We study individual rational, Pareto optimal, and incentive compatible mechanisms for auctions with heterogeneous items and budget limits. For multi-dimensional valuations we show that there can be no deterministic mechanism with these properties for divisible items. We use this to show that there can also be no randomized mechanism that achieves this for either divisible or indivisible items. For single-dimensional valuations we show that there can be no deterministic mechanism with these properties for indivisible items, but that there is a randomized mechanism that achieves this for either divisible or indivisible items. The impossibility results hold for public budgets, while the mechanism allows private budgets, which is in both cases the harder variant to show. While all positive results are polynomial-time algorithms, all negative results hold independent of complexity considerations.

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Authors
  • Dütting, Paul
  • Henzinger, Monika
  • Starnberger, Martin
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Editors
  • Goldberg, Paul W.
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Shortfacts
Category
Paper in Conference Proceedings or in Workshop Proceedings (Paper)
Event Title
8th Workshop on Internet & Network Economics (WINE 2012)
Divisions
Theory and Applications of Algorithms
Event Location
Liverpool, United Kingdom
Event Type
Workshop
Event Dates
9-12 Dec 2012
Series Name
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Publisher
Springer
Page Range
pp. 44-57
Date
2012
Official URL
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-6...
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