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International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming

ICALP 2013: Automata, Languages, and Programming pp 569–580Cite as

Competitive Auctions for Markets with Positive Externalities

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7966))

Abstract

In digital goods auctions, the auctioneer sells an item in unlimited supply to a set of potential buyers. The objective is to design a truthful auction that maximizes the auctioneer’s total profit. Motivated by the observation that the buyers’ valuation of the good might be interconnected through a social network, we study digital goods auctions with positive externalities among buyers. This defines a multi-parameter auction design problem where the private valuation of every buyer is a function of the set of other winning buyers. The main contribution of this paper is a truthful competitive mechanism for subadditive valuations. Our competitive result is with respect to a new solution benchmark \(\mathcal{F}^{(3)}\). On the other hand, we show a surprising impossibility result if comparing to the stronger benchmark \(\mathcal{F}^{(2)}\), where the latter has been used quite successfully in digital goods auctions without externalities [16].

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Mathematical Sciences, School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

    Nick Gravin

  2. Microsoft Research Asia, China

    Pinyan Lu

Authors
  1. Nick Gravin
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  2. Pinyan Lu
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, University of Bergen, Postboks 7803, 5020, Bergen, Norway

    Fedor V. Fomin

  2. Faculty of Computing, University of Latvia, Raina bulv. 19, 1586, Riga, Latvia

    Rūsiņš Freivalds

  3. Department of Computer Science, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, University of Oxford, OX1 3QD, Oxford, UK

    Marta Kwiatkowska

  4. Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Weizmann Institute of Science, POB 26, 76100, Rehovot, Israel

    David Peleg

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Gravin, N., Lu, P. (2013). Competitive Auctions for Markets with Positive Externalities. In: Fomin, F.V., Freivalds, R., Kwiatkowska, M., Peleg, D. (eds) Automata, Languages, and Programming. ICALP 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7966. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39212-2_50

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39212-2_50

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-39211-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39212-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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