A Qualitative Vickrey Auction
Speaker
Abstract
| I'll start this talk by briefly discussing Vickrey's well-known sealed- bid second-price auction, and illustrate this type of auction by noting the similarity to eBay's bidding proxy. I'll show that (under ideal circumstances) bidding your private value is a dominant strategy in this auction. After this introduction I'll propose a new similar mechanism but without (requiring) money. In this mechanism a bid can be any alternative, rather than just a monetary offer. Such an auction is applicable to situations where no numeraire is available, when there is a fixed budget, or when money is no issue. For example, suppose an open source project requires a particular module, and several companies want to contribute it at no cost (being the contributor makes it easier to interface with one's existing code. Each party proposes various combinations of functionality, and the best proposal wins; the winner is only obligated to deliver something as good as the next best proposal. |
| Contact information: |
| Meditya Wasesa |
Coordinator
