Generalizing preference elicitation in combinatorial auctions

Combinatorial auctions where agents can bid on bundles of items are desirable because they allow the agents to express complementarity and substitutability between the items. However, expressing one’s preferences can require bidding on all bundles. Selective incremental preference elicitation by the auctioneer was recently proposed to address this problem [4], but the idea was not evaluated. In this paper we show that automated elicitation is extremely beneficial: as the number of items for sale increases, the amount of information elicited is a vanishing fraction of the information collected in traditional “direct revelation mechanisms” where bidders reveal all their valuation information. The elicitors also maintain the benefit as the number of agents increases—except rank lattice based elicitors which we show ineffective. We also develop elicitors that combine different query types, and we present a new query type that takes the incremental nature of elicitation to a ne...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Benoît Hudson, Tuomas Sandholm
• Keywords: ATAL 2003, Elicitation Ratio, Incremental Preference Elicitation, Little Additional Elicitation