Auctions via social network, pioneered by Li et al. (2017), have been attracting considerable attention in the literature of mechanism design for auctions. However, no known mechanism has satisfied strategy-proofness, non-deficit, non-wastefulness, and individual rationality for the multi-unit unit-demand auction, except for some naïve ones. In this paper, we first propose a mechanism that satisfies all the above properties. We then make a comprehensive comparison with two naïve mechanisms, showing that the proposed mechanism dominates them in social surplus, seller's revenue, and incentive of buyers for truth-telling. We also analyze the characteristics of the social surplus and the revenue achieved by the proposed mechanism, including the constant approximability of the worst-case efficiency loss and the complexity of optimizing revenue from the seller's perspective.
In this paper, we study efficiency in truthful auctions via a social network, where a seller can only spread the information of an auction to the buyers through the buyers' network. In single-item auctions, we show that no mechanism is strategy-proof, individually rational, efficient, and weakly budget balanced. In addition, we propose α-APG mechanisms, a class of mechanisms which operate a trade-off between efficiency and weakly budget balancedness. In multi-item auctions, there already exists a strategy-proof mechanism when all buyers need only one item. However, we indicate a counter-example to strategy-proofness in this mechanism, and to the best of our knowledge, the question of finding a strategy-proof mechanism remains open. We assume that all buyers have decreasing marginal utility and propose a generalized APG mechanism that is strategy-proof and individually rational but not efficient. Importantly, we show that this mechanism achieves the largest efficiency measure among all strategy-proof mechanisms.
Auctions via social network, pioneered by Li et al. (2017), have been attracting considerable attention in the literature of mechanism design for auctions. However, no known mechanism has satisfied strategy-proofness, non-deficit, nonwastefulness, and individual rationality for the multi-unit unit-demand auction, except for some naïve ones. In this paper, we first propose a mechanism that satisfies all the above properties. We then make a comprehensive comparison with two naïve mechanisms, showing that the proposed mechanism dominates them in social surplus, seller's revenue, and incentive of buyers for truth-telling. We also analyze the characteristics of the social surplus and the revenue achieved by the proposed mechanism, including the constant approximability of the worst-case efficiency loss and the complexity of optimizing revenue from the seller's perspective.
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