Competitive equilibrium in two sided matching markets with general utility functions

In this paper, we study the class of competitive equilibria in two sided matching markets with general (non-quasilinear) utility functions. Mechanism design in general non-quasilinear setting is one of the biggest challenges in mechanism design. General non-quasilinear utilities can for example model smooth budget constraints as a special case. Due to the difficulty of dealing with arbitrary non-quasilinear utilities, a large fraction of the existing work have considered the simpler case of quasilinear utilities with hard budget constraints and they all rely on some form of ascending auction. For general non-quasilinear utilities, we show that such ascending auctions may not even converge in finite time. As such, almost all of the existing work on general non-quasilinear utility function ([4, 6, 17]) have resorted to non-constructive proofs based on fixed point theorems or discretization. In this paper, we give the first direct characterization of competitive equilibria in such mar...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: SIGECOM
• Authors: Saeed Alaei, Kamal Jain, Azarakhsh Malekian
• Keywords: Constructive Proofs, Direct Characterization, ECommerce, Point Theorems, SIGECOM 2011