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Abstract (2008)

Abstract

We study a class of single-round, sealed-bid auctions for items in unlimited supply, such as digital goods. We introduce the notion of competitive auctions. A competitive auction is truthful (i.e., encourages buyers to bid their utility) and yields profit that is roughly within a constant factor of the profit of optimal fixed pricing for all inputs. We justify the use of optimal fixed pricing as a benchmark for evaluating competitive auction profit. We show that several randomized auctions are truthful and competitive and that no truthful deterministic auction is competitive. Our results extend to bounded supply markets, for which we also get truthful and competitive auctions. A preliminary version of this paper appeared in [6, 7]. The new paper contains new results and refines some of the results and concepts introduced in the preliminary version.

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Download	http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.76.529
Source	http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/karlin/papers/comp-journal.pdf
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Repository	CiteSeerX - Scientific Literature Digital Library and Search Engine (United States)
Type	text
Language	English
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