Privacy-Preserving Strategyproof Auction Mechanisms for Resource Allocation in Wireless Communications

Interdependent Value Multi-unit Auctions for Initial Allocation of Emission Permits

Many spectrum auction mechanisms have been proposed for spectrum allocation problem, and unfortunately, few of them protect the bid privacy of bidders and achieve good social efficiency. In this paper, we propose PPS, a Privacy Preserving Strategyproof spectrum auction framework. We design two schemes based on PPS separately for 1) the single-unit auction model (SUA), where only single channel will be sold in the spectrum market; and 2) the multi-unit auction model (MUA), where the primary user subleases multi-unit channels to the secondary users and each of the secondary users wants to access multi-unit channels either. Since the social efficiency maximization problem is NP-hard in both auction models, we present allocation mechanisms with approximation factors of (1 + ε) and 32 separately for SUA and MUA, and further judiciously design strategyproof auction mechanisms with privacy preserving based on them. Our extensive evaluations show that our mechanisms achieve good social efficiency and with low computation and communication overhead.

Traditional auction mechanisms support price negotiations on a single item. The Internet allows for the exchange of much more complex offers in real-time. This is one of the reasons for much research on multidimensional auction mechanisms allowing negotiations on multiple items, multiple units, or multiple attributes of an item, as they can be regularly found in procurement. Combinatorial auctions, for example, enable suppliers to submit bids on bundles of items. A number of laboratory experiments has shown high allocative efficiency in markets with economies of scope. For suppliers it is easier to express cost savings due to bundling (e. g., decreased transportation or production costs). This can lead to significant savings in total cost of the procurement manager. Procurement negotiations exhibit a number of particularities: It is often necessary to consider qualitative attributes or volume discounts in bundle bids. These complex bid types have not been sufficiently analyzed. The winner determination problem requires the consideration of a number of additional business constraints, such as limits on the spend on a particular supplier or the number of suppliers. Iterative combinatorial auctions have a number of advantages in practical applications, but they also lead to new problems in the determination of ask prices. In this paper, we will discuss fundamental problems in the design of combinatorial auctions and the particularities of procurement applications.Reprint of an article from WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK 47(2)2005:126–134.

In the secondary spectrum market, more and more primary users (PUs) release their idle spectrum to secondary users (SUs). While some of the existing auction mechanisms are truthful, few of them emphasize achieving a high usage rate. Even the SUs get the channel they require, the spectrum resource is still wasted in the spare time. In this paper, we propose a Reusable Truthful Double Auction (RTDA) mechanism for spectrum management, which considers temporal reuse and improve the usage rate significantly. Mathematical inference and game theory is used to prove that RTDA is economic-robust. The simulation results show that RTDA significantly improves the spectrum usage rate. In certain scenario, the usage rate can reach up to $$100\%$$ .

One of major concerns for China and developing countries is the new international trade rule concerning carbon emissions, which one needs to know its suitable mechanism and the possible implication on China's carbon trading market. Precisely, in an emission‐and‐trade scheme, an important question is whether the auction outcome is efficient, since this is closely related with the economic costs of emissions reduction. Due to the unique features of carbon permits, existing auction mechanisms do not seem to be suitable for their distribution. Inspired by the tâtonnement process, this paper proposes a new auction mechanism for them. For both practical application and theoretical extension, the discrete and continuous situations are examined, respectively. The result shows that the proposed auction converges to Pareto optimal equilibria, and that without ties, the equilibrium is unique. For bidders, the straightforward bidding strategy is the most preferred one, in the sense that the strategy makes them avoid the risk of loss. Intuitively, the auctioneer's utility is increasing in the number of bidders, while bidders’ pay‐off is increasing in permits. To a certain extent, the proposed auction mechanism resolves the confliction between efficiency and revenue in the multi‐item auction theory, while it increases people's understanding for carbon emission auction mechanism design.

Dynamic spectrum redistribution---under which spectrum owners lease out under-utilized spectrum to users for financial gain---is an effective way to improve spectrum utilization. Auction is a natural way to incentivize spectrum owners to share their idle resources. In recent years, a number of strategy-proof auction mechanisms have been proposed to stimulate bidders to truthfully reveal their valuations. However, it has been shown that truthfulness is not a necessary condition for revenue maximization. Furthermore, in most existing spectrum auction mechanisms, bidders may infer the valuations---which are private information---of the other bidders from the auction outcome. In this paper, we propose a Differentially privatE spectrum auction mechanism with Approximate Revenue maximization (DEAR). We theoretically prove that DEAR achieves approximate truthfulness, privacy preservation, and approximate revenue maximization. Our extensive evaluations show that DEAR achieves good performance in terms of both revenue and privacy preservation.

This paper presents a method for discovering and detecting shill bids in combinatorial auctions. The Vickrey-Clarke-Groves Mechanism is one of the most important combinatorial auctions because it can satisfy the strategy-proof property, individual rationality, and Pareto efficiency, that is, it is the only mechanism that simultaneously satisfies these properties. As Yokoo et al. pointed out, false-name bids and shill bids pose an emerging problem for auctions, since on the Internet it is easy to establish different e-mail addresses and accounts for auction sites. Yokoo et al. proved that VCG cannot satisfy the false-name-proof property, and they also proved that no auction protocol can satisfy all three of the above properties and the false-name proof property simultaneously. Their approach concentrates on designing a new mechanism that has desirable properties, but this is quite complicated. As a new approach against shill-bids, in this paper, we design a mechanism that utilizes VCG and an algorithm for finding potential shill bids. Our mechanism is quite simple compared with Yokoo's approaches [11][12][13]. Our mechanism can judge whether there might be a shill bid from the results of the VCG procedure. We prove a theorem stating that shill bidders cannot increase their utilities unless all shill bidders win in the auction. Based on this theorem, our proposed mechanism compares the agents' utilities in a conventional auction with those in an auction where a shill bidder does not join in the auction. When these agents' utilities are different between the above cases, such agents might be shill bidders. Then, our mechanism allocates items to the shill bidders as a group from the set of items obtained through successful bids by the agent in the conventional auction. This process prevents shill bidders from increasing unfair profits. Furthermore, even though shill bidders participate in the auction, the seller's profit does not decrease using our proposed method. Thus, our mechanism detects shill bids when it only detects the possibility of shill bids. Our proposed method has the following three key advantages. First, we propose a method to detect shill bidders by comparison between bidders utilities. Our method is superior than existing complex mechanisms in the point of view of generalization and wide-use, because our auction mechanism employs only VCG. Second, even though there are shill bidders in an auction, incentive compatibility property is preserved using our mechanism. Finally, the schemer, in our mechanism, does never have incentive to make shill bidders. The schemer's utility does not increase in our mechanism even though a schemer make shill bidders. Namely, not to make shill bidders is dominant strategy for the schemer.

Combinatorial auctions are multiple-item auctions in which bidders may place bids on any package (subset) of goods. This additional expressibility produces benefits that have led to combinatorial auctions becoming extremely important both in practice and in theory. In the computer science community, auction design has focused primarily on computational practicality and incentive compatibility. The latter concerns mechanisms that are resistant to bidders misrepresenting themselves via a single false identity; however, with modern forms of bid submission, such as electronic bidding, other types of cheating have become feasible. Prominent amongst them is false-name bidding; that is, bidding under pseudonyms. For example, the ubiquitous Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism is incentive compatible and produces optimal allocations, but it is not false-name-proof–bidders can increase their utility by submitting bids under multiple identifiers. Thus, there has recently been much interest in the design and analysis of false-name-proof auction mechanisms. These false-name-proof mechanisms, however, have polynomially small efficiency guarantees: they can produce allocations with very low economic efficiency/social welfare. In contrast, we show that, provided the degree to which different goods are complementary is bounded (as is the case in many important, practical auctions), the VCG mechanism gives a constant efficiency guarantee. Constant efficiency guarantees hold even at equilibria where the agents bid in a manner that is not individually rational. Thus, while an individual bidder may personally benefit greatly from making false-name bids, this will have only a small detrimental effect on the objective of the auctioneer: maximizing economic efficiency. So, from the auctioneer's viewpoint the VCG mechanism remains preferable to false-name-proof mechanisms.

An auction mechanism consists of an allocation rule and a payment rule. There have been several studies on characterizing strategy-proof allocation rules; if the allocation rule satisfies a condition called weak-monotonicity, an appropriate payment rule is guaranteed to exist. One desirable property that an auction mechanism should satisfy is revenue monotonicity; a seller's revenue is guaranteed to weakly increase as the number of bidders grows. In this paper, we first identify a simple condition called summation-monotonicity for characterizing strategy-proof and revenue monotone allocation rules. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to characterize revenue monotone allocation rules. Based on this characterization, we also examine the connections between revenue monotonicity and false-name-proofness, which means a bidder cannot increase his utility by submitting multiple bids under fictitious names. In a single-item auction, we show that they are basically equivalent; a mechanism is false-name-proof if and only if it is strategy-proof and revenue monotone. On the other hand, we show these two conditions cannot coexist in combinatorial auctions under some minor condition.

We describe an evolution-based method for evaluating auction mechanisms, and apply it to a space of mechanisms including the standard first-price and second-price sealed bid auctions. We replicate results known already in the auction theory literature regarding the suitability of different mechanisms for different bidder environments, and extend the literature by establishing the superiority of novel mechanisms over standard mechanisms, for commonly occurring scenarios. Thus this paper simultaneously extends auction theory, and provides a systematic method for further such extensions.

We study envy-free (EF) mechanisms for multi-unit auctions with budgeted agents that approximately maximize revenue. In an EF auction, prices are set so that every bidder receives a bundle that maximizes her utility amongst all bundles; We show that the problem of revenue-maximizing EF auctions is NP-hard, even for the case of identical items and additive valuations (up to the budget). The main result of our paper is a novel EF auction that runs in polynomial time and provides a approximation of 1/2 with respect to the revenue-maximizing EF auction. A slight variant of our mechanism will produce an allocation and pricing that is more restrictive (so called item pricing) and gives a 1/2 approximation to the optimal revenue within this more restrictive class. © 2012 ACM.

We study the inefficiency of mixed Nash equilibria, expressed as the price of anarchy, of all-pay auctions in three different environments: combinatorial, multi-unit and single-item auctions. First, we consider item-bidding combinatorial auctions where m all-pay auctions run in parallel, one for each good. For fractionally subadditive valuations, we strengthen the upper bound from 2 (Syrgkanis and Tardos in Proceedings of the 45th symposium on theory of computing (STOC ’13), 2013) to 1.82 by proving some structural properties that characterize the mixed Nash equilibria of the game. Next, we design an all-pay mechanism with a randomized allocation rule for the multi-unit auction. We show that, for bidders with submodular valuations, the mechanism admits a unique, 75% efficient, pure Nash equilibrium. The efficiency of this mechanism outperforms all the known bounds on the price of anarchy of mixed Nash equilibria in mechanisms used for multi-unit auctions. Finally, we analyze single-item all-pay auctions motivated by their connection to contests and show tight bounds on the price of anarchy with respect to social welfare, revenue and maximum bid.

The medical industry, with its unique characteristics and inherent complexities, especially in times of war, often requires innovative approaches to resource allocation and procurement. Auction mechanisms, which are traditionally used in various industries, are gaining more and more importance in the field of health care. This study delves into the design and implementation of auctions in the Ukrainian healthcare sector, exploring their potential benefits, challenges, and implications for efficiency and equity. The results of the study contribute to the growth of knowledge about the theory of auctions and its practical application in the field of health care, offering valuable insights for medical professionals and other stakeholders involved in the allocation of resources in the Ukrainian health care system.

Multiple access technology played an important role in wireless communication in the last decades: it increases the capacity of the channel and allows different users to access the system simultaneously. However, the conventional multiple access technology, as originally designed for current human-centric wireless networks, is not scalable for future machine-centric wireless networks. Massive access (studied in the literature under such names as "massive- device multiple access," "unsourced massive random access," "massive connectivity," "massive machine-type communication," and "many-access channels") exhibits a clean break with current networks by potentially supporting millions of devices in each cellular network. The tremendous growth in the number of connected devices requires a fundamental rethinking of the conventional multiple access technologies in favor of new schemes suited for massive random access. Among the many new challenges arising in this setting, the most relevant are: the fundamental limits of communication from a massive number of bursty devices transmitting simultaneously with short packets, the design of low complexity and energy-efficient massive access coding and communication schemes, efficient methods for the detection of a relatively small number of active users among a large number of potential user devices with sporadic transmission pattern, and the integration of massive access with massive MIMO and other important wireless communication technologies. This article presents an overview of the concept of massive access wireless communication and of the contemporary research on this important topic.

We study incentive compatible mechanisms for combinatorial auctions (CAs) in an online model with sequentially arriving bidders, where the arrivals' order is either random or adversarial. The bidders' valuations are given by demand oracles. Previously known online mechanisms for CAs assume that each item is available at a certain multiplicity b>1. Typically, one assumes b=Ω(logm), where m is the number of different items. We present the first online mechanisms guaranteeing competitiveness for any multiplicity b≥1. We introduce an online variant of oblivious randomized rounding enabling us to prove competitive ratios that are close to or even beat the best known offline approximation factors for various CAs settings. Our mechanisms are universally truthful, and they significantly improve on the previously known mechanisms.