论文标题
最佳推荐拍卖设计
Optimal Referral Auction Design
论文作者
论文摘要
单一不可分割的项目的拍卖是带有转移的机理设计中最著名的问题之一。尽管它很简单，但它可以说是文献中最干净，最有见地的结果。当每个参与者可以使用拍卖的信息时，Myerson [20]提供了一个开创性的结果，以表征与激励兼容的拍卖以及收入最佳性。但是，这样的结果并不能在网络上的拍卖中保留，在网络上拍卖信息是通过代理传播的，他们需要激励措施来转发信息。近来，设计了一些拍卖（例如[13，18]），可以适当激励网络上的中间节点，以颁布信息，以便更有价值的竞标者。在本文中，我们提供了网络上激励兼容拍卖的类似迈尔森的表征，并表明当前已知的拍卖属于这类随机拍卖中。然后，我们考虑一个名为“转介拍卖”的特殊类别，其灵感来自多层营销机制[1,6,7]，并获得了I.I.D.的收入最佳推荐拍卖的结构。投标人。通过实验，我们甚至表明对于非i.i.d。竞标者在这种表征之后存在拍卖，该拍卖可以比目前已知的网络拍卖会提供更高的收入。
The auction of a single indivisible item is one of the most celebrated problems in mechanism design with transfers. Despite its simplicity, it provides arguably the cleanest and most insightful results in the literature. When the information that the auction is running is available to every participant, Myerson [20] provided a seminal result to characterize the incentive-compatible auctions along with revenue optimality. However, such a result does not hold in an auction on a network, where the information of the auction is spread via the agents, and they need incentives to forward the information. In recent times, a few auctions (e.g., [13, 18]) were designed that appropriately incentivized the intermediate nodes on the network to promulgate the information to potentially more valuable bidders. In this paper, we provide a Myerson-like characterization of incentive-compatible auctions on a network and show that the currently known auctions fall within this class of randomized auctions. We then consider a special class called the referral auctions that are inspired by the multi-level marketing mechanisms [1, 6, 7] and obtain the structure of a revenue optimal referral auction for i.i.d. bidders. Through experiments, we show that even for non-i.i.d. bidders there exist auctions following this characterization that can provide a higher revenue than the currently known auctions on networks.
