In a market of indivisible objects where a buyer consumes at most one object, the buyer-optimal auction is a multi-item generalization of Vickrey's second-price auction. If the optimal auction is formulated as a strategic game, it is well-known that it satisfies good incentive properties, i.e.,...

Ascending price auctions typically involve a single price path with buyers paying their final bid price. Using this traditional definition, no ascending price auction can achieve the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) outcome for general private valuations in the combinatorial auction setting. We relax...

To the extent that emission permits have been allocated using market mechanisms, this has been done using a sealed-bid auction design, typically with discriminatory prices. However, several authors have recommended the ascending auction format. Basically, two “competing” ascending auction...

We consider a Rothschild-Stiglitz-Spence labour market screening model and employ a centralised mechanism to coordinate the efficient matching of workers to firms. This mechanism can be thought of as operated by a recruitment agency, an employment office or head hunter. In a centralised...

Assuming that bidders wish to acquire at most one item, this paper defines a polynomial time multiitem auction that locates the VCG prices in a finite number of iterations for any given starting prices. This auction is called the Vickrey-English-Dutch auction and it contains the Vickrey-English...

This paper analyzes the problem of selecting a set of items whose prices are to be updated in the next iteration in so called simple ascending auctions with unit-demand bidders. A family of sets called "sets in excess demand" is introduced, and the main results demonstrate that a simple...

Auctions used to allocate multiple units of a homogeneous good account for a large number of transactions in market economies, the most notable example perhaps being the allocation of financial and monetary instruments, such as bonds, bills and securities. The auction format used to sell many...

Assuming that bidders wish to acquire at most one item, this paper defines a polynomial time multi-item auction that locates the VCG prices in a finite number of iterations for any given starting prices. This auction is called the Vickrey–English–Dutch auction and it contains the...