Dominant-Strategy Auction Design for Agents with Uncertain, Private Values

Abstract

We study the problem of designing auctions for agents who incur a cost if they choose to learn about their own preferences. We reformulate the revelation principle for use with such deliberative agents. Then we characterize the set of single-good auctions giving rise to dominant strategies for deliberative agents whose values are independent and private. Interestingly, this set of dominant-strategy mechanisms is exactly the set of sequential posted-price auctions, a class of mechanisms that has received much recent attention.

Cite

Text

Thompson and Leyton-Brown. "Dominant-Strategy Auction Design for Agents with Uncertain, Private Values." AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2011. doi:10.1609/AAAI.V25I1.7863

Markdown

[Thompson and Leyton-Brown. "Dominant-Strategy Auction Design for Agents with Uncertain, Private Values." AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2011.](https://mlanthology.org/aaai/2011/thompson2011aaai-dominant/) doi:10.1609/AAAI.V25I1.7863

BibTeX

@inproceedings{thompson2011aaai-dominant,
  title     = {{Dominant-Strategy Auction Design for Agents with Uncertain, Private Values}},
  author    = {Thompson, David R. M. and Leyton-Brown, Kevin},
  booktitle = {AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  year      = {2011},
  pages     = {745-750},
  doi       = {10.1609/AAAI.V25I1.7863},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/aaai/2011/thompson2011aaai-dominant/}
}