Revenue maximizing envy-free multi-unit auctions with budgets

Michal Feldman*, Amos Fiat, Stefano Leonardi, Piotr Sankowski

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

46 Scopus citations

Abstract

We study envy-free (EF) mechanisms for multi-unit auctions with budgeted agents that approximately maximize revenue. In an EF auction, prices are set so that every bidder receives a bundle that maximizes her utility amongst all bundles; We show that the problem of revenue-maximizing EF auctions is NP-hard, even for the case of identical items and additive valuations (up to the budget). The main result of our paper is a novel EF auction that runs in polynomial time and provides a approximation of 1/2 with respect to the revenue-maximizing EF auction. A slight variant of our mechanism will produce an allocation and pricing that is more restrictive (so called item pricing) and gives a 1/2 approximation to the optimal revenue within this more restrictive class.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEC '12 - Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
Pages532-549
Number of pages18
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012
Event13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, EC '12 - Valencia, Spain
Duration: 4 Jun 20128 Jun 2012

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce

Conference

Conference13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, EC '12
Country/TerritorySpain
CityValencia
Period4/06/128/06/12

Keywords

  • envy-free
  • multi-unit auctions with budgetes
  • revenue-maximizing

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