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Auctions for Divisible Resources: Price Functions, Nash Equilibrium, and Decentralized Update Schemes

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Book cover Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce IV. Designing Mechanisms and Systems (AMEC 2002)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 2531))

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Abstract

One of the many emerging applications for software agents are their ability to serve as proxies for trade and bartering. This has led to the analysis and development of auction protocols for various goods. We consider agent-mediated allocation of computational and network resources through market mechanisms. Single-good and combinatorial auctions do not apply readily to these products, thus we propose a divisible auction that is proportionally fair and has low signaling and computational costs. The structure of the auction enables us to represent optimal responses as price functions. From this we are able to characterize agent valuations and prove the existence of a unique Nash equilibrium. We further develop a decentralized algorithm that allows the agents to converge to the operating point without sharing private information.

Research supported in part by the AFOSR MURI Grant AF-DC-5-36128, and in part by the NSF ITR Grant CCR 00-85917

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois, 1308 W. Main Street, 61801-2307, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Tamer Başar

Authors
  1. Rajiv T. Maheswaran
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  2. Tamer Başar
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bath, Bath, UK

    Julian Padget

  2. IBM - Haifa Research Labs, Haifa University, Israel

    Onn Shehory

  3. Maxwell Dworkin Lab, Cambridge, MA, USA

    David Parkes

  4. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Norman Sadeh

  5. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Harthorne, NY, USA

    William E. Walsh

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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Maheswaran, R.T., Başar, T. (2002). Auctions for Divisible Resources: Price Functions, Nash Equilibrium, and Decentralized Update Schemes. In: Padget, J., Shehory, O., Parkes, D., Sadeh, N., Walsh, W.E. (eds) Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce IV. Designing Mechanisms and Systems. AMEC 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2531. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36378-5_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36378-5_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-00327-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-36378-1

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