Weakest Bidder Types and New Core-Selecting Combinatorial Auctions

Siddharth Prasad, Maria-Florina Balcan and Tuomas Sandholm

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Abstract: Core-selecting combinatorial auctions are popular auction designs that constrain prices to eliminate the incentive for any group of bidders -- with the seller -- to renegotiate for a better deal. They help overcome the low-revenue issues of classical combinatorial auctions. We introduce a new class of core-selecting combinatorial auctions that leverage bidder information available to the auction designer. We model such information through constraints on the joint type space of the bidders -- these are constraints on bidders' private valuations that are known to hold by the auction designer before bids are elicited. First, we show that type space information can overcome the well-known impossibility of incentive-compatible core-selecting combinatorial auctions. We present a revised and generalized version of that impossibility result that depends on how much information is conveyed by the type spaces. We then devise a new family of core-selecting combinatorial auctions and show that they minimize the sum of bidders' incentives to deviate from truthful bidding. We develop new constraint generation techniques -- and build upon existing quadratic programming techniques -- to compute core prices, and conduct experiments to evaluate the incentive, revenue, fairness, and computational merits of our new auctions. Our new core-selecting auctions directly improve upon existing designs that have been used in many high-stakes auctions around the world. We envision that they will be a useful addition to any auction designer's toolkit.

Date: 2025-05
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