Print Email Facebook Twitter A Qualitative Vickrey Auction Title A Qualitative Vickrey Auction Author Harrenstein, P. Máhr, T. De Weerdt, M.M. Faculty Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science Department Software Computer Technology Date 2008-09-03 Abstract The negative conclusions of the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem|that only dictatorial social choice functions are non-manipulable|can be overcome by restricting the class of admissible preference profiles. A common approach is to assume that the preferences of the agents can be represented by quasilinear utility functions. This restriction allows for the positive results of the Vickrey auction and the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism. Quasilinear preferences, however, involve the controversial assumption that there is some commonly desired commodity or numeraire|money, shells, beads, etcetera|the utility of which is commensurable with the utility of the other alternatives in question. We propose a generalization of the Vickrey auction, which does not assume the agents' preferences being quasilinear but still has some of its desirable properties. In this auction a bid can be any alternative, rather than just a monetary bid. Such an auction is also applicable to situations where no numeraire is available, when there is a fixed budget, or when money is no issue. In the presence of quasilinear preferences, however, the traditional Vickrey turns out to be a special case. In order to sidestep the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, we restrict the preferences of the bidders. We show that this qualitative Vickrey auctions always has a dominant strategy equilibrium, which moreover invariably yields a weakly Pareto efficient outcome. To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:ee14eb98-a23e-47db-97fd-385f257b555a Source COMSOC 2008: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Computational Social Choice, Liverpool, UK, 3-5 September 2008 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type conference paper Rights (c) 2008 The Author(s) Files PDF comsoc081.pdf 168 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:ee14eb98-a23e-47db-97fd-385f257b555a/datastream/OBJ/view