In a multi-unit unit-demand multi-item auction, an auctioneer is selling a collection of different items to a set of agents each interested in buying at most unit. Each agent has a different private value for each of the items. We consider the problem of designing a truthful auction that maximizes the auctioneer’s profit in this setting. Previously, there has been progress on this problem in the setting in which each value is drawn from a known prior distribution. Specifically, it has been shown how to design auctions tailored to these priors that achieve a constant factor approximation ratio profit. In this paper, we present the first prior-independent auction for this setting. This auction is guaranteed to achieve a constant fraction of the optimal expected profit for a large class of, so called, “regular” distributions, without specific knowledge of the distributions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In a multi-unit unit-demand multi-item auction, an auctioneer is selling a collection of different items to a set of agents each interested in buying at most unit. Each agent has a different private value for each of the items. We consider the problem of designing a truthful auction that maximizes the auctioneer’s profit in this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"Springer Berlin Heidelberg","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"7th International Workshop, WINE 2011, Singapore, December 11-14, 2011. 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