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SIGECOM
2003
ACM

Envy-free auctions for digital goods

14 years 4 months ago
Envy-free auctions for digital goods
We study auctions for a commodity in unlimited supply, e.g., a digital good. In particular we consider three desirable properties for auctions: • Competitive: the auction achieves a constant fraction of the optimal revenue even on worst case inputs. • Truthful: any bidder’s best strategy is to bid the maximum value they are willing to pay. • Envy-free: after the auction is run, no bidder would be happier with the outcome of another bidder (for unlimited supply auctions, this means that there is a single sale price and goods are allocated to all bidders willing to pay this price). Our main result is to show that no constant-competitive truthful auction is envy-free. We consider two relaxations of these requirements, allowing the auction to be untruthful with vanishingly small probability, and allowing the auction to give non-envy-free outcomes with vanishingly small probability. Under both of these relaxations we get competitive auctions.
Andrew V. Goldberg, Jason D. Hartline
Added 05 Jul 2010
Updated 05 Jul 2010
Type Conference
Year 2003
Where SIGECOM
Authors Andrew V. Goldberg, Jason D. Hartline
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