24 October 2008, Computational Social Choice Seminar, Mathijs de Weerdt

Abstract

I'll start this talk by discussing Vickrey's well-known sealed-bid second-price auction, and illustrate this type of auction by noting the similarity to eBay's bidding proxy. I'll briefly show that (under ideal circumstances) bidding your private value is a dominant strategy in this auction.

After this introduction I'll propose a similar mechanism without money. In this mechanism a bid can be any alternative, rather than just a monetary offer. Such an auction is applicable to situations where no numeraire is available, when there is a fixed budget, or when money is no issue. Finally I'll discuss some of the properties and variants of this mechanism.

For more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/~ulle/seminar/, or contact Ulle Endriss (ulle at illc.uva.nl).