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Auction Revenue in the General Spiteful-Utility Model

Published: 14 January 2016 Publication History

Abstract

It is well accepted that, in some auctions, a player's "true utility" may depend not only on the price he pays and whether or not he wins the good, but also on various forms of externalities, such as the prices paid by his competitors, and the identity and true value of the actual winner.
In this work, we study revenue generation in single-good auctions under a very general model of externalities: the General Spiteful-Utility Model. Specifically, we
Put forward new revenue benchmarks and solution concepts;
Design new mechanisms when some information about the players' externalities is known; and
Analyze the revenue of the second-price mechanism when only the players have information about each other.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ITCS '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science
    January 2016
    422 pages
    ISBN:9781450340571
    DOI:10.1145/2840728
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    Published: 14 January 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. externality
    2. light bayesian setting
    3. revenue
    4. single-good auction
    5. spitefulness
    6. undominated strategy

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    January 14 - 17, 2016
    Massachusetts, Cambridge, USA

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    • (2021)Game-Theoretic Models of Moral and Other-Regarding Agents (extended abstract)Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.335.19335(213-227)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2021

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