2019/04/29 by Seiji Takanashi, Takanashi, Seiji, Takehiro Kawasaki +5 · 1 citation
Business, Management and Accounting · Decision Sciences · Social Sciences · #Auction Theory and Applications #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing #Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Economics and business #Theoretical Economics (econ.TH)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1904.12422
openalex publication_date 2019/04/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper, we study efficiency in truthful auctions via a social network, where a seller can only spread the information of an auction to the buyers through the buyers' network. In single-item auctions, we show that no mechanism is strategy-proof, individually rational, efficient, and weakly budget balanced. In addition, we propose α-APG mechanisms, a class of mechanisms which operate a trade-off between efficiency and weakly budget balancedness. In multi-item auctions, there already exists a strategy-proof mechanism when all buyers need only one item. However, we indicate a counter-example to strategy-proofness in this mechanism, and to the best of our knowledge, the question of finding a strategy-proof mechanism remains open. We assume that all buyers have decreasing marginal utility and propose a generalized APG mechanism that is strategy-proof and individually rational but not efficient. Importantly, we show that this mechanism achieves the largest efficiency measure among all strategy-proof mechanisms.