Multi-unit auctions with budget limits

Shahar Dobzinski, Ron Lavi and Noam Nisan

Games and Economic Behavior, 2012, vol. 74, issue 2, 486-503

Abstract: We study multi-unit auctions for bidders that have a budget constraint, a situation very common in practice that has received relatively little attention in the auction theory literature. Our main result is an impossibility: there is no deterministic auction that (1) is individually rational and dominant-strategy incentive-compatible, (2) makes no positive transfers, and (3) always produces a Pareto optimal outcome. In contrast, we show that Ausubelʼs “clinching auction” satisfies all these properties when the budgets are public knowledge. Moreover, we prove that the “clinching auction” is the unique auction that satisfies all these properties when there are two players. This uniqueness result is the cornerstone of the impossibility result. Few additional related results are given, including some results on the revenue of the clinching auction and on the case where the items are divisible.

Keywords: Multi-unit auctions; Budget constraints; Pareto optimality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C70 D44 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (54)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089982561100131X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:74:y:2012:i:2:p:486-503

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2011.08.003

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().