Combinatorial Auctions for Player Selection in the Indian Premier League (IPL)

In 2008, the benefits of team formation by auction first became apparent in the field of professional cricket. The Indian Premier League organized sequential single-item auctions to allocate 77 cricketers to eight teams that participated in a Twenty20 cricket tournament. We argue in this article that the auction format used resulted in distortion of player valuations. We recommend a combinatorial auction scheme MRPF which enables bidders to exploit the complementary nature of the resources. A laboratory experiment undertaken to test the feasibility of MRPF indicated that it would result in a more efficient auction system.