Informational Limitations of Ascending Combinatorial Auctions.
- Liad Blumrosen ,
- Noam Nisan
Working paper. An extended abstract in EC'05 contained preliminary results. Preliminary version appeared as Discussion paper no. 382, The Center for the Study of Rationality, The Hebrew University.
We embark on a systematic analysis of the power and limitations of iterative ascending-price combinatorial auctions. We prove a large number of results showing the boundaries of what can be achieved by different models of ascending auctions item prices vs. bundle prices, anonymous prices vs. personalized prices, deterministic vs. non-deterministic, ascending vs. descending, preference elicitation vs. full elicitation, adaptive vs. non-adaptive, and single trajectory vs. multi trajectory. Two of our main result show that neither ascending item-price auctions nor ascending anonymous bundle price auctions can determine the optical allocation among general valuations. This justified the use of personalized bundle prices in iterative combinatorial auctions like the FCC spectrum auctions.