Table Of ContentLecture Notes of the Institute
for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics
and Telecommunications Engineering 14
EditorialBoard
OzgurAkan
MiddleEastTechnicalUniversity,Ankara,Turkey
PaoloBellavista
UniversityofBologna,Italy
JiannongCao
HongKongPolytechnicUniversity,HongKong
FalkoDressler
UniversityofErlangen,Germany
DomenicoFerrari
UniversitàCattolicaPiacenza,Italy
MarioGerla
UCLA,USA
HisashiKobayashi
PrincetonUniversity,USA
SergioPalazzo
UniversityofCatania,Italy
SartajSahni
UniversityofFlorida,USA
Xuemin(Sherman)Shen
UniversityofWaterloo,Canada
MirceaStan
UniversityofVirginia,USA
JiaXiaohua
CityUniversityofHongKong,HongKong
AlbertZomaya
UniversityofSydney,Australia
GeoffreyCoulson
LancasterUniversity,UK
Sanmay Das Michael Ostrovsky
David Pennock Boleslaw Szymanski (Eds.)
Auctions, Market
Mechanisms and
Their Applications
First International ICST Conference,AMMA 2009
Boston, MA, USA, May 8-9, 2009
Revised Selected Papers
1 3
VolumeEditors
SanmayDas
BoleslawSzymanski
RensselaerPolytechnicInstitute
1108thSt,Troy,NY12180USA
E-mail:{sanmay;szymansk}@cs.rpi.edu
MichaelOstrovsky
StanfordUniversityGraduateSchoolofBusiness
518MemorialWay,Stanford,CA94305USA
E-mail:[email protected]
DavidM.Pennock
Yahoo!Research,111West40thStreet
17thfloor,NewYork,NY10018,USA
E-mail:[email protected]
LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2009932900
CRSubjectClassification(1998):J.1,K.1,C.2.4,C.3,H.2.8,H.4
ISSN 1867-8211
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Preface
These proceedings present the technical cont ributions to the First Conference on Auc-
tions, Market Mechanisms, and Their Applications (AMMA), held May 8-9, 2009 in
Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The conference was devoted to issues that arise in all
stages of deploying a market mechanism to solve a problem, including theoretical and
empirical examinations. In addition to more traditional academic papers, the confer-
ence placed emphasis on experiences from the real world, including case studies and
new applications.
The main goal of AMMA was to explore the synergy required for good mechanism
design. This includes an understanding of the economic and game-theoretic issues, the
ability to design protocols and algorithms for realizing desired outcomes, and the
knowledge of specific institutional details that are important in practical applications.
We were lucky enough to attract papers and talks from economists and computer
scientists, theorists and empiricists, academics and practitioners. The program, as
reflected in these proceedings, ranged from fundamental theory on auctions and mar-
kets to empirical design and analysis of matching mechanisms, peer-to-peer-systems,
and prediction markets.
The call for papers attracted submissions from academia and industry around the
world, including Asia, North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Each paper was
reviewed by at least three Program Committee members on the basis of scientific
novelty, technical quality, and importance to the field. The Program Committee se-
lected 18 papers for presentation at the conference out of 38 submissions, most of
which are published in the proceedings. At the authors’ request, only abstracts of some
papers are included in these proceedings. This accommodates the practices of fields
outside of computer science in which journal rather than conference publishing is the
norm and conference publishing sometimes precludes journal publishing. It is ex-
pected that many of these papers will appear in a more polished and complete form in
scientific journals in the future.
Putting together AMMA 2009 was a team effort. We thank the authors for provid-
ing the content of the program. We are grateful to the Program Committee and the
external reviewers, who worked hard reviewing and providing feedback for authors.
We thank Local Chair Peter Coles for making sure everything at the venue went off
without a hitch. We thank Conference Coordinator Robert Varga, Finance Chair
Gabriella Pal, Publicity Chair Sebastien Lahaie, and Webmaster Micha l Karpowicz.
Finally, we thank the conference sponsor, the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-
Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering (ICST).
June 2009 Michael Ostrovsky
David Pennock
Boleslaw Szymanski
Organization
Steering Committee Co-chairs
Imrich Chlamtac U. Trento and Create-Net, Italy
Boleslaw Szymanski Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
Steering Committee Members
Peter Coles Harvard Business School, USA
Sanmay Das Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
Michael Ostrovsky Stanford GSB, USA
David Pennock Yahoo! Research, USA
Vincent Conitzer Duke University, USA
General Co-chairs
David Pennock Yahoo! Research, USA
Boleslaw Szymanski Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
Technical Program Chairs
Sanmay Das Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
Michael Ostrovsky Stanford GSB, USA
Local Chair
Peter Coles Harvard Business School, USA
Conference Coordinator
Robert Varga ICST
Finance Chair
Gabriella Pal ICST
Publicity Chair
Sebastien Lahaie Yahoo! Research, USA
VIII Organization
Webmaster
Michal Karpowicz Warsaw University of Technology and NASK,
Poland
Technical Program Committee
Atila Abdulkadiroglu Duke University, USA
Elliot Anshelevich Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
Itai Ashlagi Harvard Business School, USA
Imrich Chlamtac U. Trento and Create-Net, Italy
Peter Coles Harvard Business School, USA
Vincent Conitzer Duke University, USA
Sanmay Das Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
Mathijs de Weerdt Delft University of Technology,
The Netherlands
Erol Gelenbe Imperial College London, UK
Enrico Gerding University of Southampton, UK
Nicole Immorlica Northwestern University, USA
Kamal Jain Microsoft Research
Sven Koenig University of Southern California, USA
Sebastien Lahaie Yahoo! Research, USA
Kevin Leyton-Brown University of British Columbia, Canada
Robin Lee NYU Stern and Yahoo! Research, USA
Malik Magdon-Ismail Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
Mohammad Mahdian Yahoo! Research, USA
Ewa Niewiadomska-Szynkiewicz Warsaw University of Technology / NASK
Poland
Michael Ostrovsky Stanford GSB, USA
David Pennock Yahoo! Research, USA
Ariel Procaccia Microsoft Israel R&D Center, Israel
Juan Rodriguez-Aguilar IIIA, CSIC Barcelona, Spain
David Sarne Bar-Ilan University, Israel
Boleslaw Szymanski Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
Ioannis Vetsikas University of Southampton, UK
Table of Contents
Effects of Suboptimal Bidding in Combinatorial Auctions ............. 1
Stefan Schneider, Pasha Shabalin, and Martin Bichler
Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence from
Google ......................................................... 3
Bo Cowgill, Justin Wolfers, and Eric Zitzewitz
A Copula Function Approach to Infer Correlation in Prediction
Markets ........................................................ 4
Agostino Capponi and Umberto Cherubini
Manipulating Scrip Systems: Sybils and Collusion.................... 13
Ian A. Kash, Eric J. Friedman, and Joseph Y. Halpern
A Centralized Auction Mechanism for the Disability and Survivors
Insurance in Chile................................................ 25
Gonzalo Reyes H.
Information Feedback and Efficiency in Multiattribute Double
Auctions........................................................ 26
Kevin M. Lochner and Michael P. Wellman
Impact of Misalignment of Trading Agent Strategy across Multiple
Markets ........................................................ 40
Jung-woo Sohn, Sooyeon Lee, and Tracy Mullen
Market Design for a P2P Backup System (Extended Abstract)......... 55
Sven Seuken, Denis Charles, Max Chickering, and Sidd Puri
School Choice: The Case for the Boston Mechanism .................. 58
Antonio Miralles
Turing Trade: A Hybrid of a Turing Test and a Prediction Market ..... 61
Joseph Farfel and Vincent Conitzer
A Market-BasedApproach to Multi-factory Scheduling ............... 74
Perukrishnen Vytelingum, Alex Rogers, Douglas K. Macbeth,
Partha Dutta, Armin Stranjak, and Nicholas R. Jennings
Auctions with Dynamic Populations: Efficiency and Revenue
Maximization (Extended Abstract)................................. 87
Maher Said
Revenue Submodularity........................................... 89
Shaddin Dughmi, Tim Roughgarden, and Mukund Sundararajan
X Table of Contents
Fair Package Assignment.......................................... 92
S´ebastien Lahaie and David C. Parkes
Solving Winner Determination Problems for Auctions with Economies
of Scope and Scale ............................................... 93
Martin Bichler, Stefan Schneider, Kemal Guler, and Mehmet Sayal
Running Out of Numbers: Scarcity of IP Addresses and What to Do
about It ........................................................ 95
Benjamin Edelman
Author Index.................................................. 107
Effects of Suboptimal Bidding in Combinatorial
Auctions
Stefan Schneider, Pasha Shabalin, and Martin Bichler
TechnischeUniversit¨at Mu¨nchen, Germany
{schneider,shabalin,bichler}@in.tum.de
http://ibis.in.tum.de/research/ca/index.htm
Abstract. Though the VCG auction assumes a central place in the
mechanism design literature, there are a number of reasons for favor-
ingiterativecombinatorial auction designs.Severalpromisingascending
auction formats have been developed throughout the past few years
based on primal-dual and subgradient algorithms and linear program-
ming theory. Prices are interpreted as a feasible dual solution and the
provisional allocation is interpreted as a feasible primal solution. iBun-
dle(3) (Parkes and Ungar 2000), dVSV (deVries et al. 2007) and the
Ascending Proxy auction (Ausubeland Milgrom 2002) result in VCG
payoffswhen thecoalitional valuefunction satisfies thebuyersubmodu-
larity condition and bidders bid straightforward, which is an ex-
post Nash equilibrium in that case. iBEA and CreditDebit auctions
(Mishra and Parkes 2007) do not even require the buyer submodular-
ity condition and achieve the same properties for general valuations. In
many situations, however, one cannot assume bidders to bid straight-
forward and it is not clear from the theory how these non-linear per-
sonalized price auctions (NLPPAs) perform in this case. Robustness of
auctionswithrespect todifferentbiddingbehavioristhereforeacritical
issue for any application. We have conducted a large number of com-
putational experiments to analyze the performance of NLPPA designs
with respect todifferent biddingstrategies and differentvaluation mod-
els.WecomparetheresultsofNLPPAstothoseoftheVCGauctionand
thoseofiterativecombinatorialauctionswithapproximatelinearprices,
suchasALPS(Bichler et al. 2009)andtheCombinatorialClockauction
(Porter et al. 2003).
WhileNLPPAsperformedverywellincaseofstraightforwardbidding,
wecouldobserveproblemswithrespecttoauctioneerrevenue,efficiency,
andspeedofconvergenceincaseofnon-best-responsebiddingbehavior.
Under suboptimal bidding strategies, dVSV and CreditDebit auctions
havea significantly lower efficiency than iBundle(3).
In contrast, linear price combinatorial auctions were robust against
all strategies, except collusive behavior which makes it very difficult for
anyauctioneertoselectanefficientsolutioningeneral.Whileourresults
achieve high efficiency values on average, one can easily construct ex-
amples, where linear price CAs cannot be efficient (Bichler et al. 2009).
Linear-price designs suffer from the fact that they cannot be 100% ef-
ficient, but they have shown to be robust against many strategies and
bear a few advantages:
S.Dasetal.(Eds.):Amma2009,LNICST14,pp.1–2,2009.
(cid:2)c ICSTInstituteforComputerSciences,Social-InformaticsandTelecommunicationsEngineering2009
2 S. Schneider,P. Shabalin, and M. Bichler
– Only a linear numberof prices needsto be communicated.
– Linear prices, if perceived as a guideline, help bidders to easily find
interesting items and bundles and allow for endogenous bidding
(Kwon05).
– The perceived fairness of anonymous prices might be an issue in
some applications.
– The numberof auction rounds is much lower.
Overall, robustness of combinatorial auction formats against different
biddingstrategies is,asidefromefficiency,fairness, andspeedofconver-
gence, an important topic auctioneers need to care about.
References
Ausubel,L.,Milgrom, P.:Ascendingauctionswithpackagebidding.FrontiersofThe-
oretical Economics 1, 1–42 (2002)
Bichler, M., Shabalin, P., Pikovsky, A.: A computational analysis of linear-price iter-
ative combinatorial auctions. Information Systems Research 20(1) (2009)
deVries,S.,Schummer,J.,Vohra,R.:Onascendingvickreyauctionsforheterogeneous
objects. Journal of Economic Theory 132, 95–118 (2007)
Kwon, R.H., Anandalingam, G., Ungar, L.H.: Iterative combinatorial auctions with
bidder-determinedcombinations. Management Science 51(3), 407–418 (2005)
Mishra,D.,Parkes,D.:Ascendingpricevickreyauctionsforgeneralvaluations.Journal
of Economic Theory 132, 335–366 (2007)
Parkes, D., Ungar, L.H.: Iterative combinatorial auctions: Theory and practice. In:
17th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI2000) (2000)
Porter, D., Rassenti, S., Roopnarine, A., Smith, V.: Combinatorial auction design.
Proceedings of theNational AcademyofSciencesof theUnitedStatesofAmerica
(PNAS)100, 11153–11157 (2003)
