Stochastic and Contingent Payment Auctions

We describe a family of stochastic auctions that are incentive-compatible (i.e., “truthful”), and which generalize Vickrey auctions. We describe situations in which such stochastic auctions are useful. We then discuss contingent-payment auctions and their incentive-compatible counterparts Finally, we discuss how to utilize both reinforcement-learning techniques and stochastic auctions to learn probabilities for contingencies.