Print Email Facebook Twitter A Qualitative Vickrey Auction Title A Qualitative Vickrey Auction Author Harrenstein, B.P. De Weerdt, M.M. Conitzer, V. Faculty Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science Department Software Computer Technology Date 2009-07-06 Abstract Restricting the preferences of the agents by assuming that their utility functions linearly depend on a payment allows for the positive results of the Vickrey auction and the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism. These results, however, are limited to settings where there is some commonly desired commodity or numeraire|money, shells, beads, etcetera|which is commensurable with utility. We propose a generalization of the Vickrey auction that does not assume that the agents' preferences are quasilinear, but nevertheless retains some of the Vickrey auction's desirable properties. In this auction, a bid can be any alternative, rather than just a monetary offer. As a consequence, the auction is also applicable to situations where there is a fixed budget, or no numeraire is available at all (or it is undesirable to use payments for other reasons)-such as, for example, in the allocation of the task of contributing a module to an open-source project. We show that in two general settings, this qualitative Vickrey auction has a dominant-strategy equilibrium, invariably yields a weakly Pareto efficient outcome in this equilibrium, and is individually rational. In the first setting, the center has a linear preference order over a finite set of alternatives, and in the second setting, the bidders' preferences can be represented by continuous utility functions over a closed metric space of alternatives and the center's utility is equipeaked. The traditional Vickrey auction turns out to be a special case of the qualitative Vickrey auction in this second setting. To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:dba53a77-df69-4144-b6d8-20ff9f7fe649 Publisher ACM Source Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, Stanford, USA, 6-10 July 2009; authors version Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type conference paper Rights (c) 2009 ACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, 2009 Files PDF ec091.pdf 202.4 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:dba53a77-df69-4144-b6d8-20ff9f7fe649/datastream/OBJ/view